Parts of speech; essays on English

THE LIBRARY

OF

.THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

PARTS OF SPEECH

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH

"Books by Grander {Matthews :

ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS
French Dramatists of the I9th Century
Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more

or less importance
Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays
The Historical Novel, and other Essays
Parts of Speech, Essays on English
The Development of the Drama (in

preparation)

PARTS OF SPEECH

»•'•—

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH

BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS

PROFESSOR IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1901

Copyright, 1901, by
BRANDER MATTHEWS

Published September, 1901

THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.

TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

PREFATORY NOTE

A/THO the various essays which are now
brought together in this book have been
written from time to time during the past ten
years, nearly all of them have had their origin in
a desire to make plain and to emphasize one
fact: that the English language belongs to the
peoples who speak it— that it is their own pre-
cious possession, to deal with at their pleasure
and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be
obvious enough to all of us; and yet there would
be no difficulty in showing that it is not every-
where accepted. Perhaps the best way to pre-
sent it so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to
draw attention to some of its implications; and
this is what has been attempted in one or another
of these separate papers.

The point of view from which the English lan-
guage has been approached is that of the man of
letters rather than that of the professed expert in
linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that
the professed expert, even tho he discovers little

PREFATORY NOTE

that is new in these pages, will find also little
that demands his disapproval. The final essay
is frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is
an attempt to define not so much a word as a
thing.

So wise a critic of literature and of language as
Sainte-Beuve has declared that " orthography is
like society: it will never be entirely reformed;
but we can at least make it less vicious." In this
sensible saying is the warrant for the simplified
spellings adopted in the following pages. As
will be seen by readers of the two papers on our
orthography, the writer is by no means a radical
"spelling-reformer," so called. But he believes
that all of us who wish to keep the English lan-
guage up to its topmost efficiency are bound al-
ways to do all in our power to aid the tendency
toward simplification— whether of orthography
or of syntax— which has been at work unceas-
ingly ever since the language came into existence.

B. M.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
July 4, 1901.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I The Stock that Speaks the Language . 3

II The Future of the Language . ... 29

III The English Language in the United

States 47

IV The Language in Great Britain . . . 81
V Americanisms Once More 97

VI New Words and Old 127

VII The Naturalisation of Foreign Words . 165

VIII The Function of Slang 187

IX Questions of Usage 217

X An Inquiry as to Rime 241

XI On the Poetry of Place-Names . . .271

XII As to "American Spelling" .... 295

XIII The Simplification of English Spelling 319

XIV Americanism — An Attempt at a Defini-

tion 343

I

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS
THE LANGUAGE

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS
THE LANGUAGE

IT is a thousand years since the death of
the great Englishman, King Alfred, in whose
humble translations we may see the beginnings
of English literature. Until it has a literature,
however unpretending and however artless, a
language is not conscious of itself; and it is there-
fore in no condition to maintain its supremacy
over the dialects that are its jealous rivals. And
it is by its literature chiefly that a language for-
ever binds together the peoples who speak it— by
a literature in which the characteristics of these
peoples are revealed and preserved, and in which
their ideals are declared and passed down from
generation to generation as the most precious
heritage of the race.

The historian of the English people asserts that
what made Alfred great, small as was his sphere
of action, was "the moral grandeur of his life.
He lived solely for the good of his people." He
laid the foundations for a uniform system of law,
3

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

and he started schools, wishing that every free-
born youth who had the means should " abide at
his book till he can understand English writing."
He invited scholars from other lands to settle in
England; but what most told on English culture
was done not by them but by the king himself.
He " resolved to throw open to his people in their
own tongue the knowledge which till then had
been limited to the clergy," and he "took his
books as he found them," the popular manuals
of the day, Bede and Boethius and Orosius.
These he translated with his own hand, editing
freely, and expanding and contracting as he saw
fit. " Do not blame me if any know Latin better
than I," he explained with modest dignity; "for
every man must say what he says and must do
what he does according to his ability." And
Green, from whom this quotation is borrowed,
insists that, "simple as was his aim, Alfred created
English literature"— the English literature which
is still alive and sturdy after a thousand years, and
which is to-day flourishing not only in Great
Britain, where Alfred founded it, but here in the
United States, in a larger land, the existence of
which the good king had no reason ever to sur-
mise.

This English literature is like the language in
which it is written, and also like the stock that
speaks the language, wherever the race may have
4

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

planted or transplanted itself, whether by the
banks of the little Thames or on the shores of the
broad Hudson and the mighty Mississippi. Lit-
erature and language and people are practical, no
doubt; but they are not what they are often
called: they are not prosaic. On the contrary,
they are poetic, essentially and indisputably
poetic. The peoples that speak English are, and
always have been, self-willed and adventurous.
This they were long before King Alfred's time,
in the early days when they were Teutons merely,
and had not yet won their way into Britain;
and this they are to-day, when the most of them
no longer dwell in old England, but in the newer
England here in America. They have ever lacked
the restraint and reserve which are the conditions
of the best prose; and they have always exulted
in the untiring energy and the daring imagination
which are the vital elements of poetry. " In his
busiest days Alfred found time to learn the old
songs of his race by heart," so the historian tells
us; "and he bade them be taught in the palace-
school."

Lyric is what English literature has always
been at its best, lyric and dramatic; and the
men who speak English have always been indi-
vidual and independent, every man ready to fight
for his own hand; and the English language
has gone on its own way, keeping its strength in

5

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

spite of the efforts of pedants and pedagogs to
bind it and to stifle it, and ever insisting on re-
newing its freshness as best it could. Develop-
ment there has been in language and in literature
and in the stock itself, development and growth
of many kinds ; but no radical change can be de-
tected in all these ten centuries. " No national
art is good which is not plainly the nation's own,"
said Mr. Stopford Brooke in his consideration of
the earliest English lyrics. " The poetry of Eng-
land has owed much to the different races which
mingled with the original English race; it has
owed much to the different types of poetry it
absorbed— Greek, Latin, Welsh, French, Italian,
Spanish: but below all these admixtures the
English nature wrought its steady will. It
seized, it transmuted, it modified, it mastered
these admixtures both of races and of song."

The English nature wrought its steady will;
but what is this English nature, thus set up as an
entity and endowed with conscious purpose ? Is
there such a thing, of a certainty ? Can there be
such a thing, indeed ? These questions are easier
to ask than to answer. It is true that we have
been accustomed to credit certain races not merely
with certain characteristics, but even with certain
qualities, esteeming certain peoples to be spe-
cially gifted in one way or another. For example,
we have held it as an article of faith that the.
6

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

Greeks, by their display of a surpassing sense of
form, proved their possession of an artistic capa-
city finer and richer than that revealed by any
other people since the dawn of civilization. And
again, we have seen in the Roman skill in con-
structive administration, in the Latin success in
law-making and in road-building— we have seen
in this the evidence of a native faculty denied to
their remote predecessors, the Egyptians. Now
come the advocates of a later theory, who tell us
that the characteristics of the Greeks and of the
Romans are not the result of any inherent su-
periority of theirs, or of any native predisposition
toward art or toward administration, but are
caused rather by circumstances of climate, of geo-
graphical situation, and of historical position.
We are assured now that the Romans, had they
been in the place of the Greeks and under like
circumstances, might have revealed themselves
as great masters of form ; while the Greeks, had
their history been that of the Romans, would
certainly have shown the same power of ruling
themselves and others, and of compacting the
most diverse nations into a single empire.

No doubt the theory of race-characteristics, of
stocks variously gifted with specific faculties,
has been too vigorously asserted and unduly in-
sisted upon. It was so convenient and so useful
that it could not help being overworked. But
7

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

altho it is not so impregnable as it was sup-
posed to be, it need not be surrendered at the
first attack; and altho we are compelled to
abandon the theory as a whole, we can save
what it contained of truth. And therefore it is
well to bear in mind that even if the Greeks in
the beginning had no sharper bent toward art
than had the Phenicians, — from whom they bor-
rowed so much of value to be made by them
more valuable,— even if their esthetic superiority
was the result of a happy chapter of chances, it
was a fact nevertheless ; and a time came at last
when the Greeks were seen to be possessed of a
fertility of invention and of a sense of form sur-
passing all their predecessors had ever exhibited.
When this time came the Greeks were conscious
of their unexampled achievements and properly
proud of them ; and they proved that they were
able to transmit from sire to son this artistic
aptitude— however the aptitude itself had been
developed originally. So whether the Roman
power to govern and to evolve the proper instru-
ments of government was a native gift of the
Latins, or whether it was developed in them by
a fortuitous combination of geographical and his-
torical circumstances, this question is somewhat
academic, since we know that the Romans did
display extraordinary administrative ability cen-
tury after century. Whenever it was evolved,
8

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

the artistic type in Greece and the administrative
type in Italy was persistent; and it reappeared
again and again in successive generations.

This indeed needs always to be remembered,
that race-characteristics, whatever their origin,
are strangely enduring when once they are estab-
lished. The English nature whereof Mr. Stop-
ford Brooke speaks, when once it was conscious
of itself, worked its steady will, despite the
changes of circumstance; and only very slowly
is it modified by the accidents of later history and
geography. M. Fouillee has set side by side the
description of the Germans by Tacitus and the
account of the Gauls by Caesar, drawing attention
to the fact that the modern French are now very
like the ancient Gauls, and that the descendants
of the Germans of old, the various branches of
the Teutonic race, have the characteristics of their
remote ancestors whom the Roman historian
chose to praise by way of warning for his fellow-
citizens.

The Romans conquered Gaul and held it for
centuries; the Franks took it in turn and gave it
their name; but the Gallic type was so securely
fixed that the Roman first and then the Frank
succumbed to it and were absorbed into it. The
Gallic type is not now absolutely unchanged, for,
after all, the world does move; but it is readily
recognizable to this day. Certain of Caesar's
9

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

criticisms read as tho they were written by a
contemporary of Napoleon. As Caesar saw them
the Gauls were fickle in counsel and fond of re-
volutions. Believing in false rumors, they were
led into deeds they regretted afterward. Decid-
ing questions of importance without reflection,
they were ready to war without reason ; and they
were weak and lacking in energy in time of dis-
aster. They were cast down by a first defeat, as
they were inflamed by a first victory. They were
affable, light, inconstant, and vain; they were
quick-witted and ready-tongued ; they had a lik-
ing for tales and an insatiable curiosity for news.
They cultivated eloquence, having an astonishing
facility of speech, and of letting themselves be
taken in by words. And having thus summed
up Caesar's analysis of the Gaul, M. Fouillee asks
how after this we can deny the persistence of
national types.

What Tacitus has to say of the Germans comes
home more closely to us who speak English, since
the Teutonic tribes the Latin historian was con-
sidering are not more the ancestors of the modern
Prussians than they are of the wide-spread Anglo-
Saxon peoples. As those who speak English
went from the mainland across the North Sea to
an island and dwelt there for centuries, and were
joined by earlier kin from elsewhere, the race-
characteristics were obviously modified a little—

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

just as they have been as obviously modified a
little more when some of those who spoke Eng-
lish went out again from the island to a boundless
continent across the Atlantic, and were joined
here by many others, most of whom were also
derived from one or another of the varied Teu-
tonic stocks.

It is nearly two thousand years since Tacitus
studied the Teutonic race-characteristics, and yet
most of the peculiarities he noted then are evident
now. Tacitus tells us that the Teutons were
tall, fair-haired, and flegmatic. They were great
eaters, not to say gross feeders; and they were
given to strong drink. They were fond of games,
and were ready to pay their losses with their
persons, if need be. They were individual and
independent. Their manners were rude, not to
call them violent. They were possessed of the
domestic virtues, the women being chaste and
the husbands faithful. They loved war as they
loved liberty. They had a passionate fidelity to
their leaders. They decided important questions
of policy in public assembly.

The several peoples of our own time who are
descended from the Teutons thus described by
Tacitus with so sympathetic an insight have
been developing for twenty centuries, more or
less, each in its own way, under influences
wholly unlike, influences both geographical and

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

historical; and it is small wonder that they have
diverged as they have, and that no one of them
nowadays completely represents the original
stock. Some of the points Tacitus made are true
to-day in Prussia and are not true in Great Britain ;
and some hit home here in the United States,
altho they miss the mark in Germany. The
modern Germans still retain a few of these Taci-
tean characteristics which the peoples that speak
English have lost in their adventurous career over-
seas. And on the other hand, certain of the
remarks of Tacitus might be made to-day in the
United States; for example, the willingness to
run risks for the fun of the game— is not this a
present characteristic of the American as we
know him ? And here we have always been
governed by town-meeting, as the old Teutons
were, whereas the modern German is only now
getting this back by borrowing it from the
English precedent. In our private litigations
we continue to abide by the customs of our
remote Teutonic ancestors, while the German
has accepted as a legal guide the Roman law,
wrought out by the countrymen of Tacitus.

Second only to a community of language, no
unifying force is more potent than a community
of law. In the depths of their dark forests the
Teutons had already evolved their own rudi-
mentary code by which they did justice between

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

man and man; and these customary sanctions
were taken over to Britain by the Angles and
the Saxons and the Jutes; and they served as
the foundation of the common law by means of
which the peoples that speak English still ad-
minister justice in their courts. And here again
we find the handiwork of the great King Alfred,
from whom we may date the codification of an
English law as we may also reckon the establish-
ing of an English literature. With the opportu-
nism of our race, he had no thought of a new
legislation, but merely merged the best of the
tribal customs into a law for the whole kingdom.
The king sought to bring to light and to leave on
record the righteous rulings of the wise men who
had gone before. " Those things which I met
with," so the historian transmits his words,
" either of the days of Ine, my kinsman, or of
Offa, King of the Mercians, or of /Ethelberht,
who first among the English race received bap-
tism, those which seemed to me rightest, those
I have gathered, and rejected the rest."

Law and language— these are the unrelaxing
bands that hold a race firmly together. There
are now two main divisions of the Teutonic
stock, separated to-day by language and by law
—the people who speak German and are ruled
by Roman law, and the peoples who speak Eng-
lish and are governed by the common law; and
'3

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

the separation is as wide and as deep legally as
it is linguistically. " By the forms of its language
a nation expresses its very self," said one of the
acutest of British critics; and we have the proof
of this at hand in the characteristic differences
between the English language and the German.
By the forms of its law a people expresses its po-
litical beliefs ; and we have the evidence of this in
the fact that we Americans regard our rulers
merely as agents of the town-meeting of the old
Teutons, while the modern Germans are submit-
ting to a series of trials for lese-majesty.

Laws have most weight when they are seen to
be the expression of the common conscience;
and they are most respected when they best
reflect the ideals that are " the souls of the nations
which cherish them," as a historian of American
literature has finely phrased it—" the living spirits
which waken nationality into being, and which
often preserve its memory long after its life has
ebbed away." The marked difference now ob-
vious between the two great divisions of the
Teutonic stock— that which speaks English and
that which speaks German— is due in part to their
not having each conserved exactly the same por-
tion of the ideals inherited from their common
ancestors, and in part to their having each ac-
quired other ideals in the course of the many
centuries of their separate existence. And the
«4

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

minor differences to be detected between the
two great divisions of the stock that speaks Eng-
lish, that dwelling in Great Britain and that
dwelling in the United States, are due to similar
causes.

While the ancestors of the people who speak
German were abiding at home, where Tacitus had
seen them, the ancestors of the peoples who
speak English went forth across the North Sea
and possessed themselves of the better part of
Great Britain and gave it a new name. They
were not content to defeat the earlier inhabitants
in fair fight, and then to leave them in peace, as
the Romans did, ruling them and intermarrying
with them; the English thrust the natives out
violently and harried them away. As Green
puts it tersely, " The English conquest for a hun-
dred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession
and driving back of the people whom the Eng-
lish conquered." No doubt this dispossession
was ruthless ; but was it complete ? The new-
comers took the land for their own, and they
meant to kill out all the original owners; but
was this possible? The country was rough and
thickly wooded, and it abounded in nooks and
corners where a family might hide itself. More-
over, what is more likely than that the invader
should often spare a woman and take her to
wife? For centuries the English kept spreading

'5

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

themselves and pushing back the Britons; but
in the long war there were truces now and
again, and what is more likely than an incessant
intermingling of the blood all along the border
as it was slowly driven forward ?

Certain it is that one of the influences which
have modified the modern English stock is a
Celtic strain. If the peoples that speak English
are now not quite like the people that speak Ger-
man, plainly this is one reason : they have had a
Celtic admixture, which has lightened them and
contributed elements lacking in the original
Teuton. To declare just what these elements
are is not easy; but to deny their presence is
impossible. The Celt has an impetuosity and a
swiftness of perception which we do not find in
the original Teuton, and which the man who
speaks English is now more likely to possess
than the man who speaks German. The Celt
has a certain shy delicacy; he has a happy sensi-
bility and a turn for charming sentiment; he has
a delightful lyric note ; and he has at times a sin-
cere and puissant melancholy. These are all
qualities which we find in our English literature,
and especially in its greatest figure. " The Celts
do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed
population," said Henry Morley in a striking pas-
sage. " But for early, frequent, and various con-
tact with the race that in its half-barbarous days
16

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

invented Ossian's dialogues with St. Patrick, and
that quickened afterward the Northmen's blood
in France, Germanic England would not have
produced a Shakspere."

Here we see Morley declaring that the Celt had
"quickened the Northmen's blood in France";
and perhaps by his choice of a word he meant to
remind us that whereas the Northmen who sailed
down the mouth of the Seine were Teutons, the
Normans who were to sail up to Hastings had
been materially modified during their sojourn in
France, which had once been Celtic Gaul. Two
series of occasions there were when the English
received an accession of Celtic blood: first,
when they conquered England; and second,
when they in turn were conquered by the Nor-
mans, who ruled them for centuries, and were
finally merged in them, just as earlier the Romans
had been merged in the Gauls. And this recalls
to us the fact that there was more in the Norman
than the intermingling of the Teuton and the
Celt; there was in the Norman also not a little
of the Roman who had so long ruled Gaul, and
who had so deeply marked it with certain of his
own characteristics. Thus it was that the Nor-
man brought into England a Latin tradition; he
had acquired something of the Roman adminis-
trative skill, something of the Roman's genius
for affairs. After the Renascence, Latin influ-
17

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

ences were to affect the English language and
English literature; but it was after the conquest
that the English people itself came first in con-
tact with certain of the Roman ideals.

Matthew Arnold thought that we owed "to
the Latin element in our language the most of
that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which
it is contradistinguished from the modern Ger-
man " ; and he found in the Latinized Normans
in England " the sense for fact, which the Celts
had not, and the love of strenuousness, clearness,
and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the
Saxons had not. " Perhaps the English feeling for
style, our command of the larger rhetoric, may be
due to this blend of the Norman ; and it cannot be
denied that this gift has not been granted to the
modern German. The fantastic brilliancy of
De Quincey and the sonorous picturesqueness of
Ruskin are alike inconceivable in the language
of Klopstock; and altho there is a pregnant
concision in the speeches of Bismarck at his best,
there is no German orator who ever attained the
unfailing dignity and the lofty affluence of Web-
ster at his best.

Less than two centuries after the good King
Alfred had declared English law and established
English literature, the Normans came and saw
and conquered. Less than three centuries after
King William took the land there was born the

18

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

first great English poet. If the language is to-day
what it is, it is because of Chaucer, who chose
the court dialect of London to write in, and who
made it supple for his own use and the use of
the poets that were to come after. The Norman
conquest had brought a new and needed contri-
bution to the English character; it had resulted in
an immense enrichment of the English language;
and it had related English literature again to the
broad current of European life. To the original
Teutonic basis had been added Celtic and Norman
and Latin strains; and still the English nature
wrought its steady will, still it expressed itself
most freely and most fully in poetry. And in no
other poet are certain aspects of this English na-
ture more boldly displayed than in Chaucer, in
whom we find a fresh feeling for the visible
world, a true tenderness of sentiment, a joyous
breadth of humor, and a resolute yet delicate han-
dling of human character.

Two centuries after Chaucer came Shakspere,
in whom the English nature finds its fullest ex-
pression. The making of England was then
complete; all the varied elements had been fused
in the fire of a struggle for existence and welded
by war with the most powerful of foes. The
race-characteristics were then finally determined ;
and in Elizabethan literature they are splendidly
exhibited. Something was contributed by the
'9

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

literature of the Spain that the Elizabethans had
stoutly withstood, and something more by the
literature of the Italy so many of them knew by
travel; but all was absorbed, combined, and as-
similated by the English nature, like the contri-
butions that came from the classics of Rome and
Greece. Bacon and Cecil, Drake and Ralegh,
are not more typical of that sudden and glorious
outpouring of English individuality than are Mar-
lowe, Shakspere, andjonson, Spenser, Chapman,
and Massinger. In that greatest period of the
race we do not know which is the greater,
the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity,
the ability to govern, that the English then dis-
played, or the mighty sweep and range of the
imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry.
The works of the Elizabethan writers are with
us, like the memory of the deeds of the Eliza-
bethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was need-
ful, that the peoples that speak English are of a
truth poetic, that they are not prosaic.

In the days of Elizabeth the English began to
go abroad and to settle here and there. To those
who came to America there were added in due
season many vigorous folk from other Teu-
tonic sources ; and here in the centuries that have
followed was to be seen a fusion of races and a
welding into one nation such as had been seen
in England itself several centuries earlier. To

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

those who remained in England there came few
accretions from the outside, altho when the
edict of Nantes was revoked the English gained
much that the French lost. The Huguenots were
stanch men and sturdy, of great ability often,
and of a high seriousness. Some crossed the
Channel and some crossed the ocean; and no one
of the strands which have been twisted to make
the modern American is more worthy than this.
More important than this French contribution,
perhaps, was another infusion of the Celtic in-
fluence. When the King of Scotland became
King of England, his former subjects swarmed
to London— preceding by a century the Irishmen
who made themselves more welcome in the
English capital, with their airy wit and their
touch of Celtic sentiment. Far heavier than the
Scotch raid into England, and the Irish invasion,
was the influx of Scotch, of Irish, and of Scotch-
Irish into America. At the very time when Lord
Lyndhurst was expressing the opinion that the
English held the Irish to be "aliens in blood,
aliens in speech, aliens in religion," the Irish
were withdrawing in their thousands from the
rule of a people that felt thus toward them ; and
they were making homes for themselves where
prejudice against them was not potent. Yet
in England itself the Irish left their mark on lit-
erature, especially upon comedy, for which they

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

have ever revealed a delightful aptitude; and in
the eighteenth century alone the stage is lightened
and brightened by the plays of Steele, of Sheridan,
and of Goldsmith. About the end of the same
century also the Scotch began to make their
significant and stimulating contribution to Eng-
lish literature, which was refreshed again by Burns
with his breath of sympathy, by Scott with his
many-sided charm, and by Byron with his re-
sonant note of revolt.

Just as the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes
had mingled in Great Britain to make the English-
man, and had been modified by Celtic and Nor-
man and Latin influences, so here in the United
States the Puritan and the Cavalier, the Dutchman
and the Huguenot and the German, the Irish and
the Scotch and the Scotch-Irish, have all blended
to make the American. Not a few of the original
Teutonic race-characteristics recorded by Tacitus
are here now, as active as ever; and not a few of
the English race-characteristics as revealed by the
Elizabethan dramatists survive in America, keep-
ing company with many a locution which has
dropped out of use in England itself. There is
to-day in the spoken speech of the United States
a larger freedom than in the spoken speech of
Great Britain, a figurative vigor that the Eliza-
bethans would have relished and understood. It
is not without significance that the game of cards

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

best liked by the adventurers who worried the
Armada should have been born again to delight
the Argonauts of '49. The characteristic energy
of the English stock, never more exuberantly
displayed than under Elizabeth, suffered no dimi-
nution in crossing the Atlantic; rather has it been
strengthened on this side, since every native
American must be the descendant of some man
more venturesome than his kin who thought best
to stay at home. Nor is the energy less imagi-
native, altho it has not taken mainly a literary
expression. " There was no chance for poetry
among the Puritans," so Lowell reminded us,
" and yet if any people have a right to imagination,
it should be the descendants of those very Puri-
tans. " And he added tersely : " They had enough
of it, or they could never have conceived the
great epic they did, whose books are States, and
which is written on this continent from Maine to
California."

More than half those who speak English now
dwell in the United States, and less than a third
dwell within the British Isles. To some it may
seem merely fanciful, no doubt, but still the ques-
tion may be put, whether the British or the
American is to-day really closer to the Eliza-
bethan ? It has recently been remarked that the
typical John Bull was invisible in England while
Shakspere was alive, and that he has become
23

possible in Great Britain only since the day when
these United States declared their independence.
Walter Bagehot, the shrewdest of critics of his
fellow-countrymen, maintained that the saving
virtue of the British people of the middle of
the nineteenth century was a stolidity closely
akin to stupidity. But surely the Elizabethans
were not stolid; and the Americans (who have
been accused of many things) have never been
accused of stupidity. Mr. Bernard Bosanquet
has just been insisting that the two dominant
notes of the British character at the beginning of
the twentieth century are insularity and inarticu-
lateness. The Elizabethan was braggart and self-
pleased and arrogant, but he was not fairly open
to the reproach of insularity, nor was he in the
least inarticulate. Perhaps insularity and inarti-
culateness are inseparable; and it may be that it is
the immense variety of the United States that has
preserved the American from the one, as the prac-
tice of the town-meeting has preserved him from
the other.

No longer do we believe that there is any spe-
cial virtue in the purity of race, even if we could
discover nowadays any people who had a just
right to pride themselves on this. The French
are descended from the Gauls, but to the Gauls
have been added Romans and Franks; the Eng-
lish are descended from the Teutons, but they
24

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

have received many accretions from other
sources; and the Americans are descended from
the British, but it is undeniable that they have
differentiated themselves somehow. The ad-
mixture of varied stocks is held to be a source
of freshness and of renewed vitality; and it may
be that this is the cause of the American alertness
and venturesomeness. And as yet these foreign
elements have but little modified the essential
type; for just as the English nature wrought its
steady will through the centuries, so the Ameri-
can characteristics have been imposed on all the
welter of nationalities that swirl together in the
United States.

Throughout the land there is one language, a
development of the language of King Alfred, and
one law, a development of the law of King Alfred ;
and throughout the land there are schools such
as the good king wished for. American ideals
are not quite the same as British ideals, but
they differ only a little, and they have both flow-
ered from the English root, as the earlier English
ideals had flowered from a Teutonic root. The
English stock has displayed in the United States
the same marvelous assimilating faculty that it
displayed centuries ago in Great Britain, the same
extraordinary power of getting the sojourners
within its borders to accept its ideals. The law
of imitation is irresistible, as M. Tarde has
25

THE STOCK THAT SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

shown; and as M. Fouillee asserts, a nation is
really united and unified only when its whole
population thrills at the same appeal and vibrates
when the same chord is struck. Then there is
a consciousness of nationality and of true na-
tional solidarity. Throughout the United States
there is a unanimous acceptance of the old Eng-
lish ideals— a liking for energy, a respect for
character, a belief in equality before the law, and
an acceptance of individual responsibility. These
are the ideals which will echo again and again in
English literature on both shores of the Atlantic,
as they have echoed so often since King Alfred
died. " A thousand years are but as yesterday
when it is past, and as a watch in the night."
(1901)

26

II

THE FUTURE OF THE
LANGUAGE

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

TWO apparently contradictory tendencies are
to-day visible. One of them is revealed by
our increasing interest in the less important
languages and in the more important dia-
lects. The other is to be seen in the immense
expansion of the several peoples using the three
or four most widely spoken European tongues,
an expansion rapidly giving them a supremacy
which renders hopeless any attempt of the less
important European languages everto equal them.
(It may be noted now once for all that in this
paper only the Indo-European languages are taken
into account, altho Arabic did succeed for a while
in making itself the chief tongue of the Mediter-
ranean basin, overrunning Sicily and even thrust-
ing itself up into Spain, and altho Chinese may
have a fateful expansion in the dark future.)

As an instance of the first of the two conflict-
ing tendencies, we have in France the movement
of \\\Q felibres \o revive Provencal, and to make
it again a fit vehicle for poetry. We have in
29

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

Norway an effort to differentiate written Nor-
wegian from the Danish, which has hitherto been
accepted as the standard speech of all Scandi-
navian authors. We have in Belgium an in-
creasing resistance to French, which is the official
tongue, and an attempt arbitrarily to resuscitate
the Flemish dialect. We have in Switzerland a
desire to keep alive the primitive and moribund
Romansh. We have in North Britain a demand
for at least a professorship of broad Scots. We
see also that, among the languages of the smaller
nations, neither Dutch nor Portuguese shows any
symptoms of diminishing vitality, while Ruma-
nian has been suddenly encouraged by the political
independence of the people speaking it.

All this is curious and interesting; and yet at
the very period when these developments are in
progress, other influences are at work on behalf
of the languages of the greater races. The de-
velopments noted above are largely the work
of scholars and of students; they are the arti-
ficial products of provincial pride; and they
are destined to defeat by forces as invincible as
those of nature itself. In their different degrees
Provencal and Flemish are struggling for exis-
tence against French; but French itself is not
gaining in its old rivalry with English and with
German.

At the end of the seventeenth century French
30

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

was the language of diplomacy ; it was the speech
of the courts of Europe; it was the one modern
tongue an educated man in England or in Ger-
many, in Spain or in Italy, needed to acquire.
As Latin had been the world-language in the
days of the Empire, so French bade fair to be the
world-language in the days when all the parts
of the earth should be bound together by the
bands of commerce and finance. In the eigh-
teenth century the supremacy of French was still
indisputable; but in the nineteenth century it
disappeared. And, unless all calculations of
probability fail us, somewhere in the twentieth
century French will have fallen from the first
place to the fifth, just below Spanish, just above
Italian, and far, far beneath English and Russian
and German.

It was the social instinct of the French which
made their language so neat, so apt for epigram
and compliment, so admirable and so adequate for
criticism ; and it was the energy of the English-
speaking peoples, their individuality, their inde-
pendence, which made our language so sturdy,
so vigorous, so powerful.

An excess of the social instinct it is which has
kept the French at home, close to the borders of
France, and which has thus restricted the expan-
sion of their language, while it is also an excess
of the energy of our stock that has scattered Eng-
31

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

lish all over the world, on every shore of all the
seven seas. And now that the nineteenth cen-
tury has drawn to an end, if we can guess at the
future from our acquaintance with the past, we
are justified in believing that the world-language
at the end of the twentieth century— should any
one tongue succeed in winning universal accep-
tance—will be English. If it is not English, then
it will not be German or Spanish or French; it
will be Russian.

This attempt to foretell the future is not a ran-
dom venture or a reckless brag; it is based on a
comparison of the number of people speaking the
different European languages at different periods.
At my request Mr. N. I. Stone, of the School of
Political Science of Columbia University, made an
examination of the statistics, in so far as they
are obtainable. The figures are rarely absolutely
trustworthy before the nineteenth century — in-
deed, they are sometimes little better than guess-
work. Yet they are approximately accurate, and
they will serve fairly well for purposes of com-
parison. They make plain the way in which one
language has gained on another in the past; and
they afford material for us to hazard a prediction
as to the languages likely to gain most in the
immediate future.

In the fourteenth century the population of
France was about ten millions, and that of the
32

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

British Isles probably less than four millions. In
both territories there were certainly many who
did not speak the chief language; yet the pro-
portion of those who spoke French to those who
spoke English was at least ten to four.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century the
British Isles still had less than four millions, while
France had more than twelve millions. At this
same period Italy had a few more than nine mil-
lions, and Spain a few less, while the Germans
(including always the Austrians who spoke Ger-
man) were about ten millions.

Coming toward the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, we find six millions in the British Isles,
more than fourteen millions in France and in the
French-speaking portions of the adjacent coun-
tries, and more than ten millions in Italy. The
Russians then numbered nearly four millions and
a half— only a million and a half less than the
British.

At the very end of the seventeenth century the
number of those speaking English was nearly
eight millions and a half — most of them still in
the British Isles, but some of them already de-
parted into the colonies in America and else-
where. The number of those speaking French
was twenty millions, of those speaking Italian
a few less than twelve millions, and of those
speaking Russian about fifteen millions. Those
33

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

speaking Spanish were chiefly at home in the
Iberian peninsula, but not a few were in the colo-
nies in America : they amounted to about eight
millions in all, the mother-country having wasted
her people in ruinous wars.

At the very end of the eighteenth century
we find the English-speaking peoples on both
shores of the Atlantic swollen to twenty-two
millions, having nearly trebled in a hundred
years, while the French had added only a third
to their population, amounting in all to a few
more than twenty-seven millions. The Germans
were about thirty-three millions, having passed
the French; and the Italians were a few more
than thirteen millions, having increased very
slowly. Neither Germans nor Italians had as
yet been able either to achieve unity for them-
selves or to found colonies elsewhere. The
Spanish, including their pure-blooded colonists,
numbered perhaps ten millions. The Russians
had increased to twenty-five millions, the
boundaries of their empire having been widely
extended.

The nineteenth century was a period of unex-
ampled expansion for the English-speaking race,
who have spread to India, to Australia, and to
Africa, besides filling up the western parts of the
United States; they now number probably be-
tween a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred
34

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

and thirty millions. The Russians have also
pushed their borders across Asia, and they also
show an immense increase, now numbering about
a hundred and thirty millions, altho probably a
very large proportion of their conglomerate
population does not yet speak Russian. The
Germans have supplied millions of immigrants to
the United States, and thousands of expatriated
traders to all the great cities of the world; and in
spite of this loss they now number about seventy
millions (including, as before, the German por-
tions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy). The
Spanish-speaking peoples in the old world and
the new are about forty-two millions, not half
of them being in Spain itself.

The French lag far behind in this multiplica-
tion; they number now a few more than forty
millions, including those Belgians and Swiss who
have French for their mother-tongue. The rela-
tive loss of the French can best be shown by a
comparison with the English after an interval of
five hundred years. In the fourteenth century, as
we have seen, those who spoke French were to
those who spoke English as ten to four; in the
nineteenth century those who speak English are
to those who speak French as one hundred and
thirty to forty. In other words, the French dur-
ing five centuries have increased fourfold, while
the English have multiplied more than thirtyfold.

35

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

French is still the language most frequently
employed by diplomatists; it is still the tongue in
which educated men of differing nationalities
are most likely to be able to converse with each
other. But its supremacy has departed forever.
It has long been fighting a losing battle. Its
hope of becoming the world-language of the
future vanished, never to reappear, when Clive
grasped India and when Wolfe defeated Mont-
calm. At a brief interval the French let slip
their final chances of holding either the east or
the west.

The English-speaking peoples and,the Russians
have entered into the inheritance which the
French have renounced. The future is theirs,
for they are ready to go forth and subdue the
waste places of the earth. They are the great
civilizing forces of the twentieth century, each
in its own way and each in its own degree.
The Russians have revealed a remarkable
faculty of assimilation, and have taken over the
wild tribes of the east, which they are slowly
starting along the path of progress. The Eng-
lish— by which I mean always the peoples who
speak the English language — have possessed
themselves of North America and of South Africa
and of Australia; and there is no sign yet visible
of any lack of energy or of any decrease of vigor
in the branches of this hardy and prolific stock.
36

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

At the rate of increase of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the end of the twentieth century will find
eight hundred and forty millions speaking Eng-
lish and five hundred millions speaking Russian,
while those who speak German will be one hun-
dred and thirty millions and those who speak
French perhaps sixty millions. But it is very
unlikely that the rate of increase in the twentieth
century will be what it was in the nineteenth.
The extraordinary expansion of the United States
is the salient phenomenon of the nineteenth cen-
tury; and it is doubtfully possible and certainly
improbable that any such expansion can take
place in the twentieth century, even in South
Africa. On the other hand, the building of the
Siberian railroad may open to the Russians an
outlet for the overflow of their population not
unlike that offered to the English by the opening
of the middle west of the United States. The
outpouring of Germans, hitherto directed chiefly
to the United States (where they have been taught
to speak English), may perhaps hereafter be
diverted to German colonies, where the native
tongue will be cherished.

Thus it seems likely that, while the estimate
for the year 2000 of one hundred and thirty mil-
lion Germans is none too large, that of five hun-
dred million Russians is perhaps too small, and
that of eight hundred and fifty millions for the
37

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

English-speaking peoples is probably highly in-
flated. What, however, we have no reasonable
right to doubt is that German will be a bad third,
as French will be a bad fourth ; and that the Eng-
lish language and the Russian will stand far at
the head of the list, one all-powerful in the west
and the other all-powerful in the east. Which
of them will prevail against the other in the
twenty-first century no man can now foretell,
nor can he get any help from statistics.

The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by
any inspection of figures, for it will turn not so
much on mere numbers — altho the possession
of these will be an immense advantage: it will
be decided rather by the race-characteristics of
the two stocks when thrust into irresistible
opposition. The manners and customs of the
people who speak Russian and of the peoples
who speak English, their physical strength and
their vitality, their ideals, social and political —
all these things will be the decisive factors in the
final combat. Whether Russian or English shall
be the world-language of the future depends not
on the language itself and its merits and demer-
its, but on the sturdiness of those who shall then
speak it, on their strength of will, on their power
of organization, on their readiness to sacrifice
themselves for the common cause, and on their
fidelity to their ideals.

38

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

Russian is a beautiful language, so those say
who know it best: it is fresh and vigorous, as
might be expected in a speech the literature of
which is not yet old ; it is also as clear and as
direct as French. But it has one insuperable
disadvantage: its grammar is as primitive and
as complex as the grammar of German or the
grammar of Greek. The verb has an elaborate
conjugation, the noun an elaborate declension,
the adjective an elaborate method of agreement
in gender, number, and case.

Now English is fortunate in having discarded
nearly all this primitive machinery, which is
always a sign of linguistic immaturity. The
English language has shed almost all its un-
necessary complications; it has advanced from
complexity toward simplicity, while Russian
still lingers in its unreformed condition of arbi-
trary elaboration. One objection, it may be
noted, to Volapiik, which a German scholar
kindly invented as the world-language of the
future, was that its grammar was of this primi-
tive and complicated type.

In these days of the printing-press and of the
schoolmaster any radical modification of the
mother-tongue is increasingly difficult, so that it
is highly improbable that Russian can now ever
shake off these grammatical encumbrances that
really unfit it for use as a world-language to be

3Q

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

acquired by all men. Russian is one of the most
backward of modern languages in its progress
toward grammatical simplicity; and English is
one of the most forward. Italian is also a lan-
guage which had the good fortune partly to re-
form its grammar before the invention of printing
made the operation almost impossible; and Ital-
ian is like English in that it is a very easy lan-
guage to learn by word of mouth, as the rules of
grammar we must needs obey are very few,
— tho in this respect English is superior even to
Italian. If English is hard to learn when it is
taught by the eye instead of the ear, this is be-
cause of our cumbersome and antiquated spelling ;
here the Italian is far better off than the English.

Indeed, it is not a little strange that the English
language, which is one of the most advanced in
grammatical simplicity, is one of the most belated
in orthographic simplicity. In no other modern
language is the system of spelling — if system
that can be called which has no rule or reason —
more arbitrary and more chaotic than in English ;
and no other peculiarity of our language does
more to retard its diffusion than its wantonly
foolish orthography.

Probably much of the violent opposition to the
simplification of our spelling is due to the fanatic
zeal of the phonetic reformers, who have fright-
ened away all the timid respecters of tradition by
40

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

their rash insistence upon the immediate adoption
of some brand-new and comprehensive scheme.
The English-speaking peoples are essentially con-
servative and unfailingly opportunist; they abhor
all radical remedies. They are wont to remove
ancient abuses piecemeal, and not root and
branch. The most they can be got to do in the
immediate future is to follow the example of
the Italians, and to lop off gradually the most
flagrant inconsistencies and absurdities of our
present spelling, here a little and there a little,
going forward hesitatingly, but never stopping.

In this good work of injecting a little more
sense into our orthography, as in the other good
work of still further simplifying our grammar as
occasion serves and opportunity offers, we Amer-
icans may have to take the lead. The English
language is ours by inheritance, and our interest
in it is as deep and as wide as that of our British
cousins. As Mark Twain has put it, with his
customary shrewdness, it is " the King's Eng-
lish " no longer, for it has gone into the hands
of a company, and a majority of the stock is held
on our side of the Atlantic.

We Americans must awake to a sense of our
responsibility as the chief of the English-speaking
peoples. The tie that binds the British colonies
to the British crown is strong only because it is
loose; and in Australia and in Canada the condi-
4'

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

tions of life resemble those of the United States
rather than those of Great Britain. The British
Isles are the birthplace of our race, but they
no longer contain the most important branch
of the English-speaking peoples. On both
sides of the Atlantic, and afar in the Pacific also,
and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, are
"the subjects of King Shakspere," the students
of Chaucer and Dryden, the readers of Scott and
Thackeray and Hawthorne; but most of them,
or at least the largest single group, will be in the
United States at the end of the twentieth century,
as they are at the end of the nineteenth.

No one has more clearly seen the essential
unity of the English-speaking race, and no one
has more accurately stated the relation of the
American branch of this race to the British branch,
than the late John Richard Green. In his chap-
ter on the independence of America, he recorded
the fact that since 1776 "the life of the English
people has flowed not in one current, but in
two; and while the older has shown little sign
of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a
greatness which has changed the face of the
world. In wealth and material energy, as in
numbers, it far surpasses the mother-country
from which it sprang. It is already the main
branch of the English people; and in the days
that are at hand the main current of that people's
42

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE

history must run along the channel, not of the
Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and
the Mississippi."

When English becomes the world-language, —
if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of
honor and usefulness, — it will be the English lan-
guage as it is spoken by all the branches of the
English race, no doubt; but the dominant influ-
ence in deciding what the future of that language
shall be must come from the United States. The
English of the future will be the English that we
shall use here in the United States; and it is for
us to hand it down to our children fitted for the
service it is to render.

This task is ours, not to be undertaken boast-
fully or vaingloriously or in any spirit of provin-
cial self-assertion, on the one hand, or of colonial
self-depreciation on the other, but with a full
sense of the burden imposed upon us and of the
privilege that accompanies it. It is our duty to
do what we can to keep our English speech fresh
and vigorous, to help it draw new life and power
from every proper source, to resist all the attempts
of pedants to cramp it and restrain its healthy
growth, and to urge along the simplification of its
grammar and its orthography, so that it shall be
ready against the day when it is really a world-
language.
(1898)

43

Ill

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN
THE UNITED STATES

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN
THE UNITED STATES

WHEN Benjamin Franklin was in England
in 1760, he received a letter from David
Hume commenting on the style of an essay of
his writing and on his choice of words; and in
his reply Franklin modestly thanked his friend
for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his
hope that we Americans would always "make
the best English of this island our standard."
And yet when France acknowledged the inde-
pendence of the United States in 1778 and Frank-
lin was sent to Paris as our minister, Congress
duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies
to be observed in doing business with foreign
countries, and finally resolved that " all speeches
or communications may, if the public ministers
choose it, be in the language of their respective
countries; and all replies or answers shall be in
the language of the United States."

What is " the language of the United States "?
Is it " the best English " of Great Britain, as

47

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

Franklin hoped it would always be ? Franklin
was unusually far-sighted, but even he could
not foresee what is perhaps the most extraordi-
nary event of the nineteenth century,— an era
abounding in the extraordinary,— the marvelous
spread and immense expansion of the English
language. It is not only along the banks of the
Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that
children are now losing irrecoverable hours on the
many absurdities of English orthography: a like
wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores
of the Hudson, of the Mississippi, and of the
Columbia, while the same A B C's are parroted
by the little ones of those who live where the
Ganges rolls down its yellow sand and of those
who dwell in the great island which is almost
riverless. No parallel can be found in history
for this sudden spreading out of the English
language in the past hundred years— not even the
diffusion of Latin during the century when the
rule of Rome was most widely extended.

Among the scattered millions who now employ
our common speech, in England itself, in Scot-
land, Wales, and Ireland, in the United States and
Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and
in South Africa, there is no stronger bond of
union than the language itself. There is no like-
lihood that any political association will ever be
sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the
48

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

more independent colonies to the mother-coun-
try is loose enough now, even if it is never
further relaxed; and less than half of those
who have English for their mother-tongue owe
any allegiance whatever to England. The Eng-
lish-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire
are apparently fewer than the inhabitants of
the American republic; and the population of the
United Kingdom itself is only a little more than
half the population of the United States.

To set down these facts is to point out that
the English language is no longer a personal
possession of the people of England. The
power of the head of the British Empire over
what used to be called the " King's English " is
now as little recognized as his power over what
used to be called the "king's evil." We may
regret that this is the case, or we may rejoice at
it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And
thus we are face to face with more than one very
interesting question. What is going to become
of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad
and freed from all control by a central authority
and exposed to all sorts of alien influences ? Is
it bound to become corrupted and to sink from its
high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter
of barbarously fashioned verbal novelties ? What,
more especially, is going to be the future of the
English language here in America ? Must we fear
49

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

the dread possibility that the speech of the peo-
ples on the opposite sides of the Western Ocean
will diverge at last until the English language
will divide into two branches, those who speak
British being hardly able to understand those
who speak American, and those who speak
American being hardly able to understand those
who speak British ? Mark Twain is a humorist,
it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has
abundant common sense; and it was Mark
Twain who declared a score of years ago that he
spoke the "American language."

The science of linguistics is among the young-
est, and yet it has already established itself so
firmly on the solid ground of ascertained truth
that it has been able to overthrow with ease one
and another of the many theories which were ac-
cepted without question before it came into being.
For example, time was— and the time is not
so very remote, it may be remarked— time was
when the little group of more or less highly edu-
cated men who were at the center of authority
in the capital of any nation had no doubt what-
soever as to the superiority of their way of speak-
ing their own language over the manner in
which it might be spoken by the vast majority
of their fellow-citizens deprived of the advan-
tages of a court training. This little group set
the standard of speech; and the standard they
50

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

set was accepted as final and not to be tampered
with under penalty of punishment for the crime
of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence
from the customs of speaking and writing they
themselves cherished was due to ignorance and
probably to obstinacy. They believed that the
court dialect which they had been brought up to
use was the only true and original form of the
language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross
impropriety every usage and every phrase with
which they themselves did not happen to be
familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole
validity of their personal habits of speech they
had no need for self-assertion, since it never en-
tered into the head of any one not belonging to
the court circle to question for a second the
position thus tacitly declared.

Yet if modern methods of research -have made
anything whatever indisputable in the history of
human speech, they have "completely disproved
the assumption which underlies this implicit
claim of the courtiers. We know now that the
urban dialect is not the original language of which
the rural dialects are but so many corruptions.
We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are
often really closer to the original tongue than the
urban dialect; and that the urban dialect itself
was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes
its preeminence rarely to any superiority of its

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

own over its rivals, but rather to the fact that it
chanced to be the speech of a knot of men more
masterful than the inhabitants of any other vil-
lage, and able therefore to expand their village to
a town and at last to a city, which imposed its
rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants
of these being by that time forgetful that they
had once striven with it on almost equal terms.
Generally it is the stability given by political pre-
eminence which leads to the development of a
literature, without which no dialect can retain its
linguistic supremacy.

When the sturdy warriors whose homes were
clustered on one or another of the seven hills of
Rome began to makealliances and conquests, they
rendered possible the future development of their
rough Italic into the Latin language which has
left its mark on almost every modern European
tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans,
who possessed dialects of an equal antiquity and
of an equal possibility of improvement, could not
but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought,
perforce, to bring their vocabulary and their syn-
tax into conformity with that of the men who
had shown themselves more powerful. Thus
one of the Italic dialects was singled out by for-
tune for an extraordinary future, and the other
Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho
they were each of them as old as the Roman and
52

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

as available for development. These other dia-
lects have even suffered the ignominy of being
supposed to be corruptions of their triumphant
brother.

The French philologist Darmesteter concisely
explained the stages of this development of one
local speech at the expense of its neighbors. As
it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow.
A local speech thus neglected is a patois; and a
local speech which achieves the dignity of litera-
ture is a dialect. These written tongues spread
on all sides and impose themselves on the sur-
rounding population as m6re noble than the patois.
Thus a linguistic province is created, and its dia-
lect tends constantly to crush out the various
patois once freely used within its boundaries.

In time one of these provinces becomes politi-
cally more powerful than the others and extends
its rule over one after another of them. As it
does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the
provinces as the official tongue, and it tends 'con-
stantly to crush out these other dialects, as they
had tended constantly to crush out the various
patois. Thus the local speech of the population
of the tiny island in the Seine, which is the
nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to the
dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech
of each of the neighboring villages sank into a
patois— altho originally it was in no wise in-

53

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

ferior. In the course of centuries Paris became
the capital of France, and its provincial dialect
became the official language of the kingdom.
When the kings of France extended their rule
over Normandy and over Burgundy and over
Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in impos-
ing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces
as superior; and in time the Norman dialect and
the Burgundian and the Provencal were ousted.

The dialect of the province in which the king
dwelt and in which the business of governing
was carried on, could not but dispossess the dia-
lects of all the other provinces; and thus the
French language, as we know it now, was once
only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was ap-
parently no linguistic inferiority of the langue
d'oc to the langue d'oil ; and the reasons for the
dominion of the one and the decadence of the
other are purely political. Of course, as the
Parisian dialect grew and spread itself, it was
enriched by locutions from the other provincial
dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of
many of its grammatical complexities not com-
mon to the most of the others.

The French language was developed from one
particular provincial dialect probably no better
adapted for improvement than any one of half a
dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of
precision infinitely finer than any of its pristine

54

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

rivals, since they had none of them the good for-
tune to be chosen for development. But the
patois of the peasant of Normandy or of Brittany,
however inadequate it may be as a means of
expression for a modern man, is not a corruption
of French, any more than Doric is a corruption
of Attic Greek. It is rather in the position of a
twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fel-
low, more adroit in getting the good will of their
parents. It was the literary skill of the Athe-
nians themselves, and not the superiority of the
original dialect, that makes us think of Attic
as the only genuine Greek, just as it was the
prowess of the Romans in war and their power
of governing which raised their provincial dialect
into the language of Italy, and then carried it
triumphant to every shore of the Mediterranean.
The history of the development of the English
language is like the history of the development
of Greek and Latin and French; and the English
language as we speak it to-day is a growth from
the Midland dialect, itself the victor of a struggle
for survivorship with the Southern and Northern
dialects. " With the accession of the royal house
of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England," so
Professor Lounsbury tells us, "the dialect of
Wessex had become the cultivated language of
the whole people— the language in which books
were written and laws were published." But
55

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

when the Norman conquest came, altho, to
quote from Professor Lounsbury again, "the
native tongue continued to be spoken by the
great majority of the population, it went out of
use as the language of high culture, " and " the edu-
cated classes, whether lay or ecclesiastical, pre-
ferred to write either in Latin or in French — the
latter steadily tending more and more to become
the language of literature as well as of polite
society. " And as a result of this the West-Saxon
had to drop to the low level of the other dialects ;
"it had no longer any preeminence of its own."
There was in England from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries no national language, but
every one was free to use with tongue and pen
his own local speech, altho three provincial
dialects existed, " each possessing a literature of
its own and each seemingly having about the
same chance to be adopted as the representative
national speech."

These three dialects were the Southern (which
was the descendant of Wessex, once on the way
to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland
(which had the sole advantage that it was a com-
promise between its neighbors to the north and
the south). London was situated in the region
of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore " the
tongue mainly employed at the court" when
French slowly ceased to be the language of the
56

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

upper classes. As might be expected in those
days before the printing-press and the spelling-
book imposed uniformity, the Midland dialect
was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern
counties from the way it was spoken in the
Western counties of the region. London was in
the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and
London was the capital. Probably because the
speech of the Eastern division of the Midland dia-
lect was the speech of the capital, it was used as
the vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court
—who happened also to be a great poet and a
great literary artist. Just as Dante's choice of his
native Tuscan dialect controlled the future de-
velopment of Italian, so Chaucer's choice con-
trolled the future development of English. It
was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares,
" who first showed to all men the resources of
the language, its capacity of representing with
discrimination all shades of human thought and
of conveying with power all manifestations of
human feeling."

The same writer tells us that " the cultivated
English language, in which nearly all English
literature of value has been written, sprang
directly from the East-Midland division of the
Midland dialect, and especially from the variety
of the East-Midland which was spoken at Lon-
don and the region immediately to the north of

57

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

it." That this magnificent opportunity came to
the London dialect was not due to any superiority
it had over any other variety of the Midland dia-
lect: it was due to the single fact that it was the
speech of the capital— just as the dialect of the
Ile-de-France in like manner served as the stem
from which the cultivated French language
sprang. The Parisian dialect flourished and im-
posed itself on all sides; within the present limits
of France it choked out the other local dialects,
even the soft and lovely Provencal ; and beyond
the boundaries of the country it was accepted
in Belgium and in Switzerland.

So the dialect of London has gone on growing
and refining and enriching itself as the people
who spoke it extended their borders and passed
over the wide waters and won their way to far
countries, until to-day it serves not merely for the
cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of Mon-
tana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is ade-
quate for the various needs of the Scotch philoso-
pher and of the American humorist ; it is employed
by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the
governor of Alaska, and the general in command
over the Philippines. In the course of some six
centuries the dialect of a little town on the
Thames has become the mother-tongue of mil-
lions and millions of people scattered broadcast
over the face of the earth.
58

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

If the Norman conquest had not taken place
the history of the English race would be very
different, and the English language would not be
what it is, since it would have had for its root
the Wessex variety of the Southern dialect. But
the Norman conquest did take place, and the
English language has for its root the Eastern
division of the Midland dialect. The Norman
conquest it was which brought the modest but
vigorous young English tongue into close contact
with the more highly cultivated French. The
French spoken in England was rather the Nor-
man dialect than the Parisian (which is the true
root of modern French), and whatever slight in-
fluence English may have had upon it does not
matter now, for it was destined to a certain
death. But this Norman-French enlarged the
plastic English speech against which it was press-
ing; and English adopted many French words,
not borrowing them, but making them our own,
once for all, and not dropping the original English
word, but keeping both with slight divergence of
meaning.

Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that
we owe the double vocabulary wherein our lan-
guage surpasses all others. While the frame-
work of English is Teutonic, we have for many
things two names, one of Germanic origin and
one of Romance. Our direct, homely words,

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

that go straight to our hearts and nestle there—
these are most of them Teutonic. Our more
delicate words, subtle in finer shades of mean-
ing— these often come to us from the Latin
through the French. The secondary words are
of Romance origin, and the primary words of
Germanic. And this— if the digression may here
be hazarded— is one reason why French poetry
touches us less than German, the words of the
former seeming to us remote, not to say sophis-
ticated, while the words of the latter are akin to
our own simpler and swifter words.

One other advantage of the pressure of French
upon English in the earlier stages of its develop-
ment, when it was still ductile, was that this
pressure helped us to our present grammatical
simplicity. Whenever the political intelligence
of the inhabitants of the capital of a district
raises the local dialect to a position of supremacy,
so that it spreads over the surrounding districts
and casts their dialects into the shadow, the
dominant dialect is likely to lose those of its
grammatical peculiarities not to be found also in
the other dialects. Whatever is common to
them all is pretty sure to survive, and what is
not common may or may not be given up. The
London dialect, in its development, felt the in-
fluence, not only of the other division of the
Midland dialect, and of the two rival dialects,
60

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

one to the north of it and the other to the south,
but also of a foreign tongue spoken by all who
pretended to any degree of culture. This attri-
tion helped English to shed many minor gram-
matical complexities still retained by languages
which had not this fortunate experience in their
youth.

Perhaps the late Richard Grant White was
going a little too far when he asserted that Eng-
lish was a grammarless tongue; but it cannot be
denied that English is less infested with gram-
mar than any other of the great modern languages.
German, for example, is a most grammarful
tongue; and Mark Twain has explained to us
(in ' A Tramp Abroad ') just how elaborate and
intricate its verbal machinery is; and the Vola-
piik, which was made in Germany, had the
syntactical convolutions of its inventor's native
tongue.

By its possession of this grammatical com-
plexity, Volapiik was unfitted for service as a
world-language. A fortunate coincidence it is
that English, which is becoming a world-language
by sheer force of the energy and determination
of those whose mother-speech it is, should early
have shed most of these cumbersome and re-
tarding grammatical devices. The earlier phi-
lologists were wont to consider this throwing off
of needless inflections as a symptom of decay.
61

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

The later philologists are coming to recognize it
as a sign of progress. They are getting to regard
the unconscious struggle for short-cuts in speech,
not as degeneration, but rather as regeneration.
As Krauter asserts, " The dying out of forms and
sounds is looked upon by the etymologists with
painful feelings; but no unprejudiced judge will
be able to see in it anything but a progressive
victory over lifeless material." And he adds,
with terse common sense: "Among several
tools performing equal work, that is the best
which is the simplest and most handy." This
brief excerpt from the German scholar is bor-
rowed here from a paper prepared for the Modern
Language Association by Professor C. A. Smith,
in which may be found also a dictum of the Dan-
ish philologist Jespersen: "The fewer and
shorter the forms, the better; the analytic struc-
ture of modern European languages is so far from
being a drawback to them that it gives them an
unimpeachable superiority over the earlier stages
of the same languages." And it is Jespersen
who boldly declares that " the so-called full and
rich forms of the ancient languages are not a
beauty, but a deformity."

In other words, language is merely an instru-
ment for the use of man; and like all other in-
struments, it had to begin by being far more
complicated than is needful. The watch used to
62

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

have more than a hundred separate parts, and
now it is made with less than twoscore, losing
nothing in its efficiency and in precision. Greek
and German are old-fashioned watches; Italian
and Danish and English are watches of a later
style. Of the more prominent modern languages,
German and Russian are the most backward,
while English is the most advanced. And the
end is not yet, for the eternal forces are ever
working to make our tongue still easier. The
printing-press is a most powerful agent on the
side of the past, making progress far more slug-
gish than it was before books were broadcast; yet
the English language is still engaged in sloughing
off its outworn grammatical skin. Altho in the
nineteenth century the changes in the structure
of English have probably been less than in any
other century of its history, yet there have been
changes not a few.

For example, the subjunctive mood is going
slowly into innocuous desuetude; the stickler for
grammar, so-called, may protest in vain against
its disappearance: its days are numbered. It
serves no useful purpose; it has to be laboriously
acquired; it is now a matter of rule and not of
instinct; it is no longer natural: and therefore it
will inevitably disappear, sooner or later. Care-
ful investigation has shown that it has already
been discarded by many even among those who
63

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

are very careful of their style— some of whom,
no doubt, would rise promptly to the defense of
the form they have been discarding uncon-
sciously. One authority declares that altho the
form has seemed to survive, it has been empty
of any distinct meaning since the sixteenth cen-
tury.

This is only one of the tendencies observable
in the nineteenth century; and we may rest as-
sured that others will become visible in the
twentieth. But when English is compared with
German, we cannot help seeing that most of
this work is done already. Grammar has been
stripped to the bone in English; and for us who
have to use the language to-day it is fortunate
that our remote ancestors, who fashioned it for
their own use without thought of our needs,
should have had the same liking we have for the
simplest possible tool, and that they should have
cast off, as soon as they could, one and another
of the grammatical complexities which always
cumber every language in its earlier stages, and
most of which still cumber German. In nothing
is the practical directness of our stock more
clearly revealed than in this immediate beginning
upon the arduous task of making the means of
communication between man and man as easy
and as direct as possible. Doubly fortunate are
we that this job was taken up and put through
64

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

before the invention of printing multiplied the
inertia of conservatism.

It was the political supremacy of Paris which
made the Parisian dialect the standard of French;
and it was the genius of Dante which made the
Tuscan dialect the standard of Italian. That the
London dialect is the standard of English is due
partly to the political supremacy of the capital
and partly to the genius of Chaucer. As the
French are a home-keeping people, Paris has re-
tained its political supremacy; while the English
are a venturesome race and have spread abroad
and split into two great divisions, so that London
has lost its political supremacy, being the capital
now only of the less numerous portion of those
who have English as their mother-tongue.

It is true, of course, that a very large propor-
tion of the inhabitants of the United States, how-
ever independent politically of the great empire
of which London is the capital, look with affec-
tion upon the city by the Thames. Their feeling
toward England is akin to that which led Haw-
thorne to entitle his record of a sojourn in Eng-
land ' Our Old Home.' The American liking for
London itself seems to be increasing; and, as
Lowell once remarked, "We Americans are be-
ginning to feel that London is the center of the
races that speak English, very much in the sense
that Rome was the center of the ancient world."
65

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

It was at a dinner of the Society of Authors
that he»said this, and he then added: "I confess
that I never think of London, which I also con-
fess I love, without thinking of the palace David
built, ' sitting in the hearing of a hundred streams '
—streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity."

While the London dialect is the stem from
which the English language has grown, the vo-
cabulary of the language has never been limited
by the dialect. It has been enriched by countless
words and phrases and locutions of one kind or
another from the other division of the Midland
dialect and from both the Northern and the
Southern dialects— just as modern Italian has not
limited itself to the narrow vocabulary of Flor-
ence. Yet in the earlier stages of the develop-
ment of English the language benefited by
the fact that there was a local standard. The
attempt of all to assimilate their speech to that
of the inhabitants of London tended to give uni-
formity without rigidity. As men came up to
court they brought with them the best of the
words and turns of speech peculiar to their own
dialect; and the language gained by all these
accretions.

Shakspere contributed Warwickshire localisms

not a few, just as Scott procured the acceptance

of Scotticisms hitherto under a ban. As Spenser

had gone back to Chaucer, so Keats went to the

66

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

Elizabethans and dug out old words for his own
use; and William Morris pushed his researches
farther and brought up words almost pre-
Chaucerian. Every language in Europe has been
put under contribution at one time or another for
one purpose or another. The military vocabu-
lary, for instance, reveals the former superiority
of the French, just as the naval vocabulary reveals
the former superiority of the Dutch. And as
modern science has extended its conquests, it has
drawn on Greek for its terms of precision.

Under this influx of foreign words, old and
new, the framework of the original London dia-
lect stands solidly enough, but it is visible only
to the scholarly specialist in linguistic research.
But the latest London dialect, the speech of the
inhabitants of the British capital at the end of
the nineteenth century, has ceased absolutely to
serve as a standard. Whatever utility there was
in the past in accepting as normal English the
actual living dialect of London has long since
departed without a protest. No educated Eng-
lishman any longer thinks of conforming his
syntax or his vocabulary to the actual living dia-
lect of London, whether of the court or of the
slums. Indeed, so far is he from accepting the
verbal habits of the man in the street as suggest-
ing a standard for him that he is wont to hold
them up to ridicule as cockney corruptions. He
67

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

likes to laugh at the tricks of speech that he
discovers on the lips of the Londoners, at their
dropping of their initial b's more often than he
deems proper, and at their more recent substi-
tution of y for a— as in "tyke the cyke, lydy."

The local standard of London has thus been
disestablished in the course of the centuries sim-
ply because there was no longer a necessity for
any local standard. The speech of the capital
served as the starting-point of the language; and
in the early days a local standard of usage was
useful. But now, after English has enjoyed
a thousand years of growth, a standard so primi-
tive is not only useless, but it would be very
injurious. Nor could any other local standard be
substituted for that of London without manifest
danger— even if the acceptance of such a standard
was possible. The peoples that speak English
are now too widely scattered and their needs are
too many and too diverse for any local standard
not to be retarding in its limitations.

To-day the standard of English is to be sought
not in the actual living dialect of the inhabitants
of any district or of any country, but in the lan-
guage itself, in its splendid past and in its mighty
present. Five hundred years ago, more or less,
Chaucer sent forth the first masterpieces of Eng-
lish literature; and in all those five centuries the
language has never lacked poets and prose-
68

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

writers who knew its secrets and could bring
forth its beauties. Each of them has helped to
make English what it is now; and a study of
what English has been is all that we need to en-
able us to see what it will be— and what it should
be. Any attempt to trammel it by a local stan-
dard, or by academic restrictions, or by school-
masters' grammar-rules, is certain to fail. In the
past, English has shaken itself free of many a
limitation; and in the present it is insisting on its
own liberty to take the short-cut whenever that
enables it to do its work with less waste of time.
We cannot doubt that in the future it will go on
in its own way, making itself fitter for the mani-
fold needs of an expanding race which has the
unusual characteristic of having lofty ideals while
being intensely practical. A British poet it was,
Lord Houghton, who once sent these prophetic
lines to an American lady:

That ample speech ! That subtle speech !
Apt for the need of all and each ;
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force; expand its powers;
And through the maze of civic life,
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours.

The English language is the most valuable
possession of the peoples that speak it, and that
69

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

have for their chief cities, not London alone, or
Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and
Chicago, Calcutta and Bombay, Melbourne and
Montreal. The. English language is one and in-
divisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a
local standard may lead it ever to break up into
fragmentary dialects. There is really no danger
now that English will not be uniform in all the
four quarters of the world, and that it will not
modify itself as occasion serves. We can already
detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary ;
but these are only trifles. The steamship and
the railroad and the telegraph bring the American
and the Briton and the Australian closer together
nowadays than were the users of the Midland
dialect when Chaucer set forth on his pilgrimage
to Canterbury ; and then there is the printing-
press, whereby the newspaper and the school-
book and the works of the dead-and-gone
masters of our literature bind us together with
unbreakable links.

These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary
—London from Edinburgh, and New York from
Bombay— are but evidences of the healthy activ-
ity of our tongue. It is only when it is dead that
a language ceases to grow. It needs to be con-
stantly refreshed by new words and phrases as
the elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to
be part of Shakspere's good fortune that he came
70

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

when English was ripe and yet fresh, when there
was an abundance of words ready to his hand,
but none of them yet exhausted by hard work.
So Mr. Howells has recently recorded his feeling
that any one who now employs English "to depict
or to characterize finds the phrases thumbed over
and worn and blunted with incessant use," and
experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are
now and again " reported from the lips of the
people."

" From the lips of thepeople" ; —here is a phrase
that would have sadly shocked a narrow-minded
scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned
of yesterday denied— and, indeed, have de-
nounced as rank heresy— the more learned of
to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language
of a people is the spoken word, not the written.
Language lives on the tongue and in the ear;
there it was born, and there it grows. Man
wooed his wife and taught his children and dis-
cussed with his neighbors for centuries before he
perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the
work of the world is done rather by the spoken
word than by the written. And those who are
doing the work of the world are following the
example of our remote ancestors who did not
know how to write; when they feel new needs
they will make violent efforts to supply those
needs, devising fresh words put together in

7'

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly. The
mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments,
to risk a new locution, to hazard a wrenching of
an old term to a novel use. The hand that
writes is always slow to accept the result of these
attempts to meet a demand in an unauthorized
way. The spoken language bristles with innova-
tions, while the written language remains properly
conservative. Few of these oral babes are viable,
and fewer still survive; while only now and
again does one of these verbal foundlings come
of age and claim citizenship in literature.

In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our
grandfathers handed down to us there are solemn
warnings against neologisms— and neologism
was a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a
new word as such. But in the stimulating study
of certain of the laws of linguistics, which M.
Breal, one of the foremost of French philologists,
has called 'Semantics,' we are told that to con-
demn neologisms absolutely would be most un-
fortunate and most useless. " Every progress in
a language is, first of all, the act of an individual,
and then of a minority, large or small. A land
where all innovation should be forbidden would
take from its language all chance of develop-
ment." And M. Breal points out that language
must keep on transforming itself with every new
discovery and invention, with the incessant
72

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

modification of our manners, of our customs,
and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work
on the vocabulary of the future, ignorant and
learned, authors and artists, the man of the
world and the man in the street; and even our
children have a share in this labor, and by no
means the least.

Among all these countless candidates for lite-
rary acceptance, the struggle for existence is very
fierce, and only the fittest of the new words sur-
vive. Or, to change the figure, conversation
might be called the Lower House, where all the
verbal coinages must have their origin, while
literature is the Upper House, without whose
concurrence nothing can be established. And
the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy ;
they resist all attempts of which they do not
approve. In language, as in politics, the power
of the democratic principle is getting itself more
widely acknowledged. The people blunders
more often than not, but it knows its own mind;
and in the end it has its own way. In language,
as in politics, we Americans are really conserva-
tive. We are well aware that we have the right
to make what change we please, and we know
better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we
do not desire to do so. We want no more
change in our laws or in our language than is
absolutely necessary.

73

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

We have modified the common language far
less than we have modified the common law.
We have kept alive here many a word and many
a meaning which was well worthy of preserva-
tion, and which our kin across the seas had
permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford,
in his comprehensive volume on ' English Prose,'
praises American authors for refreshing old
words by novel combinations. When Mr. W.
Aldis Wright drew up a glossary of the words,
phrases, and constructions in the King James
translation of the Bible and in the Book of Com-
mon Prayer, which were obsolete in Great Britain
in the sense that they would no longer naturally
find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor
Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of
these words, phrases, and constructions are not
now obsolete in the United States, and would
be used by any American writer without fear
that he might not be understood. As Lowell
said, our ancestors " unhappily could bring over
no English better than Shakspere's, ' and by
good fortune we have kept alive some of the
Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our
trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric
vigor now rarely to be matched in the street-
phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his
living. Ben Jonson would have relished one
New York phrase that an office-holder gives an
74

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

office-seeker, "the glad hand and the marble
heart," and that other which described a former
favorite comedian as now having "a fur-lined
voice."

When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he
thought that we Americans had already modified
the English language. British critics, like Dean
Alford, have often animadverted upon the deteri-
oration of the language on this side of the Atlan-
tic. American humorists, like Mark Twain, have
calmly claimed that the tongue they used was
not English, but American. It is English as
Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force and
a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of
the language; but in so far as American usage
differs from British, it was according to the
former and not according to the latter. But they
differ in reality very slightly indeed; and what-
ever divergence there may be is rather in the
spoken language than in the written. That the
spoken language should vary is inevitable and
advantageous, since the more variation is at-
tempted, the better opportunity the language has
to freshen up its languishing vocabulary and to
reinvigorate itself. That the written language
should widely vary would be the greatest of
misfortunes.

Of this there is now no danger whatever, and
never has been. The settlement of the United
75

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

States took place after the invention of printing;
and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a
new dialect nowadays. The disestablishment
of the local standard of London leaves English
free to develop according to its own laws and its
own logic. There is no longer any weight of
authority to be given to contemporary British
usage over contemporary American usage— ex-
cept in so far as the British branch of English
literature is more resplendent with names of high
renown than the American branch. That this was
the case in the nineteenth century— that the
British poets and prose-writers outnumber and
outvalue the American— must be admitted at
once; that it will be the case throughout the
twentieth century may be doubted. And when-
ever the poets and prose-writers of the American
branch of English literature are superior in num-
ber and in power to those of the British branch,
then there can be no doubt as to where the
weight of authority will lie. The shifting of the
center of power will take place unconsciously;
and the development of English will go on just
the same after it takes place as it is going on
now. The conservative forces are in no danger
of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether
in the United States or in Great Britain or in any
of her colonial dependencies.
Perhaps the principle which will govern can
76

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES

best be stated in another quotation from M.
Breal: "The limit within which the right to in-
novate stops is not fixed by any idea of ' purity '
(which can always be contested) ; it is fixed by
the need we have to keep in contact with the
thought of those who have preceded us. The
more considerable the literary past of a people,
the more this need makes itself felt as a duty, as
a condition of dignity and force." And there is
no sign that either the American or the British
half of those who have our language for a mother-
tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to
the literary past of English literature, that most
magnificent heritage— the birthright of both
of us.
(1899)

77

IV

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT
BRITAIN

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

HpHERE is a wide gap between the proverb
1 asserting that " figures never lie " and the
opinion expressed now and again by experts that
nothing can be more mendacious than statistics
misapplied; and the truth seems to lie between
these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is
the backbone of history, so a statement of fact
can be made terser and more convincing if the
figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we
wish to perceive the change of the relative posi-
tion of Great Britain and the United States in the
course of the centuries, nothing can help us bet-
ter to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case
than a comparison of the population of the two
countries at various periods.

In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and
Ireland numbered between eight and nine mil-
lions, while the inhabitants of what is now the
United States were, perhaps, a scant three hun-
dred thousand. In 1900, the people of the Brit-
ish Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven

81

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

millions more or less, and the people of the
United States are almost exactly twice as many,
being about seventy-five millions. To project a
statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazar-
dous proceeding; and no man can now guess at
the probable population either of the United
Kingdom or of the United States in the year
2000; but as the rate of increase is far larger in
America than in England, there is little risk in
suggesting that a hundred years from now the
population of the American republic will be at
least four or five times as large as that of the
British monarchy.

Just as the center of population of the United
States has been steadily working its way west-
ward, having been in 1800 in Maryland and
being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of
population of the English-speaking race has been
steadily moving toward the Occident. Just as
the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies
during the nineteenth century, so will the second
of them have to cross the Atlantic during the
twentieth century. Whether this latter change
shall take place early in the century or late, is
not important; one day or another it will take
place, assuredly.

Inevitably it will be accompanied or speedily
followed by another change of almost equal sig-
nificance. London sooner or later will cease to

83

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

be the literary center of the English-speaking
race. For many centuries the town by the
Thames has been the heart of English literature;
and there are now visible very few signs that the
days of its supremacy are numbered. Even in
the United States to-day the old colonial attitude,
not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to
be as well acquainted with second-rate British
authors as the British are with American authors
of the first rank. Yet it is not without signifi-
cance that at the close of the nineteenth century
the two most widely known writers of the lan-
guage should be one of them an American citizen
and the other a British colonial, owing no local
allegiance to London— Mark Twain and Rudyard
Kipling.

The disestablishment of London as the literary
center of English will be retarded by various cir-
cumstances. Only very reluctantly is a tradition
of preeminence overthrown when consecrated
by the centuries. The conditions of existence in
England are likely long to continue to be more
favorable to literary productivity than are the
conditions in America. In a new country litera-
ture finds an eager rival in life itself, with all its
myriad opportunities for self-expression. No
paradox is it to say that more than one American
bard may have preferred to build his epic in steel
or in stone rather than in words. The creative
83

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

imagination has outlets here denied it in a long-
settled community, residing tranquilly in a little
island, where even the decorous landscape seems
to belong to the Established Church. But the
Eastern States are already, many of them, as or-
derly and as placid as Great Britain has been for a
century. The conditions in England and in Amer-
ica are constantly tending toward equalization.

A time will come, and probably long before
the close of the twentieth century, when there
will be in the United States not only several
times as many people as there are in the British
Isles, but also far more literary activity. Sooner
or later most of the leading authors of English
literature will be American and not British in
their training, in their thought, in their ideals.
That is to say, the British in the middle of the
twentieth century will hold to the Americans
about the same position that the Americans
held toward the British in the middle of the
nineteenth century. The group of American
authors between 1840 and 1860 contained Irving
and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne, Longfel-
low and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau.
These are names endeared to us and highly im-
portant to us, and not to be neglected in any
consideration of English literature; but it is fool-
ish for an American to seek to set them up as
the equal of the British group flourishing during
84

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

the same score of years. So in the middle of the
twentieth century the British group will probably
not lack striking individualities; but, as a whole,
it will probably be surpassed by the American
group. The largest portion of the men of letters
who use English to express themselves, as well
as the largest body of the English-speaking race,
will have its residence on the western shore of
the Western Ocean.

What will then happen to the English lan-
guage in England when England awakens to the
fact that the center of the English-speaking race
is no longer within the borders of the little
island ? Will the speech of the British sink into
dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely
stamp out their undue local divergences from the
normal English of the main body of the users of
the language in the United States ? Will they
frankly accept the inevitable ? Will they face
the facts as they are ? Will they follow the lead
of the Americans when we shall have the leader-
ship of the language, as the Americans followed
their lead when they had it ? Or will they insist
on an arbitrary independence, which can have
only one result— the splitting off of the British
branch of our speech from the main stem of the
language ? To ask these questions is to project
an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation
is not without an interest of its own. And
85

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

altho it is difficult to decide so far in advance
of the event, yet we have now some of the
material on which to base a judgment as to what
is likely to happen.

Of course, the question is not one to be
answered offhand; and not a few arguments
could be brought forward in support of the
opinion that the British speech of the future is
likely to separate itself from the main body of
English as then spoken in this country. In the
first place, England, altho it has already ceased
to be the most populous of the countries using
English, will still be the senior partner of the
great trading-company known as the British
Empire. That the British Empire may be dis-
solved is possible, no doubt. The Australian
colonies have federated; and having formed a
strong union of their own, they may prefer to
stand alone. South Africa may follow the ex-
ample of Australia. India may arise in the might
of her millions and cast out its English rulers.
Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the
greater American republic. But each of these
things is improbable; and that they should all
come to pass is practically inconceivable. All
signs now seem to point not only to a continu-
ance of the British Empire, but also to its steady
expansion. London is likely long to be the cap-
ital of an empire upon which the sun never sets,

86

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

an empire inhabited by men of every color and
every creed and every language. For these men
English must serve as the means of communica-
tion one with another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer
with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck.

That this will put a strain on the language is
indisputable. Wherever any tongue serves as a
lingua franca for men of various stocks, there
is an immediate tendency toward corruption.
There is a constant pressure to simplify and to
lop off and to reduce to the bare elements. The
Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example
of what may befall a noble language when it is
enslaved to serve many masters, ignorant of its
history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling's
earliest tales are some of them almost incompre-
hensible to readers unacquainted with the vocab-
ulary of the competition-walla; and the reports
of the British generals during the war with the
Boers were besprinkled with words not hitherto
supposed to be English.

Some observers see in this a menace to the
integrity of the language, a menace likely to be-
come more threatening as the British Empire
spreads itself still farther over the waste places
of the earth. But is there not also a danger in
the integrity of English close at home— in Eng-
land itself, even in London, and not afar in the
remote borders of the Empire— the danger due
87

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

to the prevalence of local dialects ? To the stu-
dent of language one of the most obvious differ-
ences between Great Britain and the United States
lies in the fact that we in America have really no
local dialects such as are common in England.
Every county of England has an indigenous pop-
ulation, whose ancestors dwelt in the same place
since a time whereof the memory of man run-
neth not to the contrary; and this indigenous
population has its own peculiarities of pronuncia-
tion, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down
from father to son, generation after generation.
But no one of the United States was settled
exclusively by immigrants from a single English
county; and, therefore, no one of these local
dialects was ever transplanted bodily to America.
And no considerable part of the United States
has a stationary population, inbreeding and stag-
nant and impervious to outside influences;
indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and
there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to
grow up in the middle west, to be married in
New York, and to die in Colorado— is not this a
characteristic of us Americans ? And it is a
characteristic fatal to the development of real
dialects in this country such as are abundant in
England. Of course we have our local peculi-
arities of idiom and of pronunciation, but these
are very superficial indeed. Probably there has

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

been a closer uniformity of speech throughout
the United States for fifty years past than there
is even to-day in Great Britain, where the York-
shireman cannot understand the cockney, and
where the Scot sits silent in the house of the
Cornishman.

This uniformity of speech throughout the
United States is, perhaps, partly the result of
Noah Webster's ' Spelling-Book.' It has certainly
been aided greatly by the public-school system,
firmly established throughout the country, and
steadily strengthening itself. The school system
of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is
not yet adequately organized; it has still to be
adjusted to its place in a proper scheme of
national education. In the higher institutions of
learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge,
there is no postgraduate work in English; and
whatever instruction an undergraduate may get
there in English literature is incidental, not to
say accidental.

Probably there is no connection between this
lack of university instruction in English and a
carelessness in the use of the language which
strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpre-
meditated letters of scholarly Englishmen, but
sometimes even in their more academic efforts.
Jowett's correspondence, for example, and Mat-
thew Arnold's, offer examples of a slovenliness
89

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

of phrase not to be found in Lowell's letters or
in Emerson's.

Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not
merely among the uneducated, but among the
more highly cultivated. Directly is used for as
soon as by Archbishop Trench (the author of a
lively little book on words) and by Mr. Court-
hope (the Oxford professor of poetry). Like is
used for as— that is, " like we do "—by Charles
Darwin, and in more than one volume of the
English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John
Morley. The elision of the initial h, which the
British themselves like to think a test of breeding,
is discoverable far more often than they imagine
on the lips of those who ought to know better.
It is said that Lord Beaconsfield, for example,
sometimes dropped his b's, and that he once
spoke of "the 'urried 'Udson." And if we may
rely on the evidence of spelling, the British often
leave the h silent where we Americans sound it.
They write an historical essay from which it is
a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective
'istorical. In Mr. Kipling's ' From Sea to Sea' he
writes not only an hotel and an hospital, but also
an hydraulic.

Thus we see that the immense size and varie-
gated population of the British Empire may be
considered as a menace to the integrity of the
English language in the British Isles; and that a
90

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

second source of danger is to be discovered in
the local dialects of Great Britain; and, finally,
that there is observable in England even now a
carelessness in the use of the language and a
willingness to innovate both in vocabulary and
in idiom.

But however formidable these three tendencies
may look when massed together, there is really
no weight to be attached to any of them singly
or to all of them combined. The language has
already for two centuries been exposed to con-
tact with countless other tongues in America and
Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration
up to the present time; and there is no reason to
fear that this contact will be more corrupting in
the twentieth century than it has been in the
nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather
in an enrichment and refreshment of the vocabu-
lary. The danger from the local dialects of Great
Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by
day as the facilities for travel improve and as the
schoolmaster is able to impose his uniform Eng-
lish upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to
use new words not authorized by the past of the
language is in itself not blameworthy; it may be
indeed commendable when it is restrained by a
conservative instinct and controlled by reason.

The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of
London newspapers are like the Americanisms to
9«

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

be seen in the pages of the New York news-
papers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the
healthiness of the language itself. In Latin it may
be proper enough for us to set up a Ciceronian
standard and to reject any usage not warranted
by the masterly orator; but in English it is absurd
to declare any merely personal standard and to
reject any term or any idiom because it was un-
known to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison
or to Franklin, to Thackeray or to Hawthorne.
Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision as re-
gards the propriety of any usage may be accepted
as final. English is a living tongue, and the
great writers of every generation make unhesi-
tating use of words and of constructions which
the great writers of earlier generations were
ignorant of or chose to ignore.

The most of these British innovations, both of
to-day and of to-morrow, will be individual and
freakish ; and, therefore, they will win no foot-
hold even in the British vocabulary. But a few
of them will prove their own excuse for being,
and these will establish themselves in Great
Britain. The best of them, those of which the
necessity is indisputable, will spread across the
Atlantic and will be welcomed by the main body
of users of English over here— just as certain
American innovations and revivals were hospi-
tably received in England when only the smaller
92

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

branch of the English-speaking race was on the
American side of the ocean. And, of course,
the new terms which spring into existence in the
United States after the literary center of the lan-
guage has crossed the Atlantic will be carried
over to England in books and in periodicals.

When the bulk of contemporary English liter-
ature is produced by American authors, and
when the British themselves have accepted the
situation and resigned themselves at last to the
departure of the literary supremacy of London,
then the weight of American precedent will be
overwhelming. Without knowing it, British
readers of American books will be led to conform
to American usage; and American terms will not
seem outlandish to them, as these words and
phrases do even now, when comparatively few
American authors are read in Great Britain. And
these American innovations will be very few, for
the conservative instinct is in some ways stronger
in the United States than it is in Great Britain,
due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread pop-
ular education here, which gives to every child a
certain solidarity with the past.

It is education and the school-book; it is the
printing-press and the newspaper and the maga-
zine; it is the ease of travel across the Atlantic
and the swiftness of the voyage;— it is a com-
bination of all these things which will prevent
93

THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN

any development of a British branch of the lan-
guage after the numerical preponderance of the
American people becomes overwhelming. And
working toward the same union is a loyal con-
servatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoy-
ment of the great literature of the language, the
common possession of both British and Ameri-
cans, having its past in the keeping of the elder
division of the stock, and certain to transfer its
future to the care of the younger division.

To declare that the literary center of English is
to be transferred sooner or later from the British
Isles to the United States may seem to some a
hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as
any prophecy before the event can hope to be.
Such a transfer, it is true, is perhaps unprece-
dented in literary history,— altho the scholar
may see a close parallel in the preeminence once
attained by Alexandria as the capital of Greek
culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or
not, the transfer is inevitable sooner or later.

(1899)

94

V
AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

IT is a reflection upon what we are wont to term
a liberal education that the result of college
training sometimes appears to be rather a nar-
rowing of the mental outlook than the broadening
we have a right to anticipate. What a student
ought to have got from his four years of labor is
a conviction of the vastness of human know-
ledge and a proper humility, due to his discov-
ery that he himself possesses only an infinitesi-
mal fraction of the total sum. Many graduates
—indeed, most of them nowadays, we may
hope— have attained to this much of wisdom:
that they are not puffed up by the few things
they do know, so much as made modest by the
many things they cannot but admit themselves to
be ignorant of. With the increasing specializa-
tion of the higher education, the attitude of the
graduate is likely to be increasingly humble; and
a college man will not be led to feel that he is
expected to know everything about everything.
Perhaps the disputatious arrogance of a few of
97

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

the younger graduates of an earlier generation
was due to the dogmatism of the teaching they
sat under. In nothing is our later instruction
more improved than in the disappearance of this
authoritative tone— due in great measure, it
may be, to the unsettling of old theories by new
facts. In no department of learning was the
manner more dogmatic than in the teaching of
the English language. The older rhetoricians
had no doubts at all on the subject. They never
hesitated as to the finality of their own judgment
on all disputed points. They were sure that they
knew just what the English language ought to
be; and it never entered into their heads to ques-
tion their own competence to declare the stan-
dard of speech. Yet, as a matter of fact, they
knew little of the long history of the language,
and they had no insight into the principles that
were governing its development. At most, their
information was limited to the works of their
immediate predecessors ; and for a more remote
past they had the same supreme contempt they
were ever displaying toward the actual present.
Thus they were ever ready to lay down rules
made up out of their own heads; and their acts
were as arbitrary as their attitude was intolerant.
In his ' Philosophy of Rhetoric,' which he tells
us was planned in 1750, Dr. George Campbell
quotes with approval Dr. Johnson's assertion that
98

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

the " terms of the laboring and mercantile part of
the people" are mere "fugitive cant," not to be
" regarded as part of the durable matter of a
language." Dr. Campbell himself refuses to
consider it as an evidence of reputable and pres-
ent use that a word or a phrase has been em-
ployed by writers of political pamphlets or by
speakers in the House of Commons, and he de-
clares that he has selected his prose examples
" neither from living authors, nor from those who
wrote before the Revolution : not from the first,
because an author's fame is not so firmly estab-
lished in his lifetime; nor from the last, that
there may be no suspicion that his style is su-
perannuated. " Now contrast this narrow-minded-
ness with the liberality discoverable in our more
recent text-books— in the ' Elements of Rhetoric,'
for example, of Professor George R. Carpenter,
who tells us frankly that " whenever usage
seems to differ, one's own taste and sense must
be called into play." Professor Carpenter then
pleads " for a considerable degree of tolerance in
such matters. If we know what a man means,
and if his usage is in accordance with that of a
large number of intelligent and educated people,
it cannot justly be called incorrect. For lan-
guage rests, at bottom, on convention or agree-
ment, and what a large body of reputable people
recognize as a proper word or a proper meaning
99

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

of a word cannot be denied its right to a place in
the English vocabulary."

For an Englishman to object to an American-
ism as such, regardless of its possible propri-
ety or of its probable pertinence, and for an
American to object to a Briticism as such— either
of these things is equivalent to a refusal to allow
the English language to grow. It is to insist
that it is good enough now and that it shall not
expand in response to future needs. It is to im-
pose on our written speech a fatal rigidity. It is
an attempt on the part of pedants so to bind the
limbs of the language that a vigorous life will
soon be impossible. With all such efforts those
who have at heart the real welfare of our tongue
will have no sympathy — least of all the strong
men of literature who are forever ravenous after
new words and old. Victor Hugo, for example,
so far back as 1827, when the modern science of
linguistics was still in its swaddling-clothes, had
no difficulty in declaring the truth. " The French
language," he wrote in the preface to ' Cromwell,'
" is not fixed, and it never will be. A living lan-
guage does not fix itself. Mind is always on the
march, or, if you will, in movement, and lan-
guages move with it. ... In vain do our liter-
ary Joshuas command the language to stand still;
neither the language nor the sun stands still any
more. The day they do they fix themselves; it

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

will be because they are dying. That is why
the French of a certain contemporary school is a
dead language."

In the 'Art of French Poetry,' first printed in
1565, Ronsard, one of the most adroit of Vic-
tor Hugo's predecessors in the mastery of verse,
proffers this significant advice to his fellow-
craftsmen (I am availing myself of the satis-
factory translation of Professor B. W. Wells):
"You must choose and appropriate dexterously
to your work the most significant words of the
dialects of our France, especially if you have not
such good or suitable words in your own dialect;
and you must not mind whether the words are
of Gascony, of Poitiers, of Normandy, Manche,
or Lyonnais, as long as they are good and signify
exactly what you want to say. . . . And ob-
serve that the Greek language would never have
been so rich in dialects or in words had it not
been for the great number of republics that flour-
ished at that time, . . . whence came many dia-
lects, all held without distinction as good by the
learned writers of those times. For a country
can never be so perfect in all things that it can-
not borrow sometimes from its neighbors."

Here we have Ronsard declaring clearly that
local varieties of speech are most useful to the
common tongue. Indeed, we may regard the
dialect of any district as a cache— a hidden store-

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

house — at which the language may replenish
itself whenever its own supplies are exhausted.
Whoever has had occasion to study any of these
dialects, whether in Greek or in French or in
English, must have been delighted often at the
freshness and the force of words and phrases
unexpectedly discovered. Edward Fitzgerald,
the translator of Omar Khayyam, made an affec-
tionate collection of Suffolk sea-phrases, and
from these a dozen might be culled, or a score or
more, by the use of which the English language
would be the gainer. Lowell's loving and
learned analysis of the speech of his fellow New-
Englanders is familiar to all readers of the ' Big-
low Papers.' It was Lowell also who has left us
this brilliant definition: "True Americanisms are
self-cocking phrases or words that are wholly of
our own make, and do their work shortly and
sharply at a pinch."

Characteristically witty this definition is, no
doubt, but not wholly adequate. What is an
Americanism ? And what is a Briticism ? Not
long ago a friendly British writer rebuked his
fellow-countrymen for a double failing of theirs
—for their twin tricks of assuming, first, that
every vulgarism unfamiliar to them is an Ameri-
canism, and that therefore, and secondly, every
Americanism is a vulgarism. In the mouths of
many British speakers " Americanism " serves as a
1 02

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

term of reproach; and so does " Briticism " in the
mouths of some American speakers. But this
should not be; the words ought to be used with
scientific precision and with no flush of feeling.
Before using them, we must ascertain with what
exact meaning it is best to employ them.

An American investigator gathered together a
dozen or two queer words and phrases that he
had noted in recent British books and journals,
and as they were then wholly unknown to
America, he branded them as Briticisms, only to
evoke a prompt protest from Mr. Andrew Lang.
For the stigmatized words and phrases Mr. Lang
proffered no defense; but he boldly denied that
it was fair to call them Briticisms. True, one or
another of them had been detected in pages of
this or that British author. Yet they were not
common property: they were individualisms;
they were to be charged against each separate
perpetrator and not against the whole United
Kingdom. Mr. Lang maintained that when
Walter Pater used so odd a term as evanescing,
this use " scarcely makes it a Briticism ; it was a
Paterism."

This is a plea in confession and avoidance,
but its force is indisputable. To admit it, how-
ever, gives us a right to insist that the same jus-
tice shall be meted out to the so-called American-
isms which Mr. Lang has more than once held up
103

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

to British execration. If the use of an ill-made
word like essayette or leaderette or sermonette by
one or more British writers does not make it a
Briticism until it can be proved to have come
into general use in Great Britain, then, of course,
the verbal aberrations of careless Americans, or
even the freakish dislocations of the vocabulary
indulged in by some of our more acrobatic hu-
morists, does not warrant a British writer in
calling any chance phrase of theirs an Ameri-
canism. Mr. W. S. Gilbert once manufactured
the verb "to burgle," and Mr. Gilbert is a British
writer of good repute ; but burgling is not there-
fore a Briticism : it is a Gilbertism. Mr. Edison,
an inventor of another sort, once affirmed that a
certain article giving an account of his kineto-
phonograph had his "entire indorsation." Ac-
cording to Mr. Lang's theory, indorsation, not
being in use generally in the United States, is
not an Americanism: it is an Edisonism.

The more Mr. Lang's theory is considered, the
sounder it will appear. Individual word-coinages
are not redeemable at the national treasury either
in the United Kingdom or in the United States.
Before a word or a phrase can properly be called
a Briticism or an Americanism there must be
proof that it has won its way into general use on
its own side of the Atlantic. Right away for
" at once " is an Americanism beyond all dispute,
104

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

for it is wide-spread throughout the United
States ; and so is back of for " behind." Directly
for " as soon as " is a Briticism equally indispu-
table; and so is different to for " different from.''
In each of these four cases there has been a local
divergence from the traditional usage of the Eng-
lish language. All four of these divergences may
be advantageous, and all four of them may even
be accepted hereafter on both sides of the Atlan-
tic; but just now there is no doubt that two of
them are fairly to be called Americanisms and
two of them are properly to be recorded as
Briticisms.

Every student of our speech knows that true
Americanisms are abundant enough; but the
omission of terms casually employed here and
there, seed that fell by the wayside, springing up
only to wilt away— the omission of all individu-
alisms of this sort simplifies the list immensely,
just as a like course of action in England cuts
down the number of Briticisms fairly to be cata-
logued as such. It must be remarked, however,
that the collecting of so-called Americanisms is a
pastime that has been carried on since the early
years of the nineteenth century, whereas it was
only in the closing decades of that century that
attention was called to the existence of Briticisms,
and to the necessity of a careful collection of
them. The bulky tomes which pretend to be
105

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

' Dictionaries of Americanisms ' are stuffed with
words and phrases having no right there.

These dictionaries would be very slim if they
contained only true Americanisms, that is to say,
words and phrases in common use in the United
States and not in common use in the United
Kingdom. Yet they would be slimmer still if
another limitation is imposed on the use of the
word. Is a term fairly to be called an American-
ism if it can be shown to have been formerly in
use in England, even though it may there have
dropped out of sight in the past century or two ?
Now, everybody knows that dozens of so-called
Americanisms are good old English, neglected by
the British and allowed to die out over there, but
cherished and kept alive over here. Such is
guess=" incline to think"; such is reali%e="lo
make certain or substantial"; such is reckon =
"consider" or "deem"; such is a few=" a lit-
tle"; such is nights= "at night"; and such are
dozens of other words often foolishly animad-
verted upon as indefensible Americanisms, and
all of them solidly established in honorable an-
cestry. An instructive collection of these survi-
vals can be seen in Mr. H. C. Lodge's aptly en-
titled and highly interesting essay on ' Shakspere's
Americanisms.'

It is with an amused surprise that an American
in his occasional reading keeps coming across in
106

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

the pages of British authors of one century or an-
other what he had supposed to be Americanisms,
and even what he had taken sometimes for mere
slang. The cert of the New York street-boy,
apparently a contraction of certainly, is it not
rather the certes of the Elizabethans ? And
the interrogative bow ?=" what is it ? "—a usage
abhorred by Dr. Holmes, —this can be discovered
in Massinger's plays more than once (' Duke of
Milan,' iii. 3, and 'Believe as You List,' ii. 2).
" I 'm pretty considerably glad to see you," says
Manuel, in Colley Gibber's ' She Would and She
Would Not.' To fire otit=" expel forcibly," is
in Shakspere's Sonnets and also in ' Ralph Rois-
ter Doister '— altho, perhaps, with a slightly dif-
ferent connotation from that now obtaining in
America. A theatrical manager nowadays likes
to have the first performance of a new play out
of town so that he can come to the metropolis
with a perfected work, and he calls this trying it
on tbe dog ; the same expression, almost, is to be
found in Pope. In ' Pickwick,' Sam Weller pro-
poses to settle tbe basb of an opponent; and in
' Tess of the Durbervilles ' we find down to the
ground used as a superlative, and quite in our
own later sense. The Southern peart is in ' Lor-
na Doone,' and the Southwestern dog-gone it is in
the 'Little Minister.' In Mr. Barrie's story also
do we find to go back on your word ; just as in
107

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

Mr. William Watson's ' Excursions in Criticism '
we discover grit =" staying power" or "dog-
gedness."

Very amusing indeed is the attitude of the
ordinary British newspaper reviewer toward
words and phrases in this category. Not being
a scholar in English, he is unaware that scholar-
ship is a condition precedent to judgment; and
he is swift to denounce as American innovations
terms firmly rooted in the earlier masters of the
language, while he passes the frequent Briticisms
in the pages of contemporary London writers
without a hint of reproof. From a British author
like Rossetti he accepts "the gracile spring,"
while he rejects "gracile ease" in an American
author like Mr. Howells. Behind this arrogant
ignorance is to be perceived the assumption that
the English language is in immediate peril of dis-
ease and death from American license if British
newspapers fail to do their duty. The shriller
the shriek of protest is, the slighter the protester's
competence upon the question at issue. No out-
cry against the deterioration of English in Amer-
ica has come from any of the British scholars who
can speak with authority about the language.

What we Americans have done is to keep alive
or to revive many a good old English term ; and
for this service to our common speech our British
cousins ought to be properly grateful. We must

108

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

admit that words and phrases and usages thus
reinstated are not true Americanisms— however
much we might like to claim them for our very
own. We have already seen that most of the
individualisms of eccentric or careless writers are
also not to be received as true Americanisms.
And there is yet a third group of so-called Ameri-
canisms not fairly entitled to the name. These
are the terms devised in the United States to
meet conditions unknown in England. Here is
no divergence from the accepted usage of the
language, but a development of the common
tongue to satisfy a new necessity. The need for
the new word or phrase was first felt in America,
and here the new term had to be found to sup-
ply the immediate want. But the word itself,
altho frankly of American origin, is not to be
styled an Americanism. It is a new English
word, that is all— a word to be used hereafter in
the United Kingdom as in the United States. It
is an American contribution to the English lan-
guage; but it is not an Americanism— if we limit
Americanism to mean a term having currency
only in North America, just as Briticism means a
term having currency only in the British Islands.
The new thing exists now, and as it came into
existence in America, we stood sponsors for it;
but the name we gave it is its name once for all,
to be used by the British and the Australians
109

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

and the Canadians as well as by ourselves.
Telephone, for example, —both the thing and the
word are of American invention,— is there any
one so foolish as to call telephone an Americanism?
These American contributions to the English
language are not a few. Some of them are brand-
new words, minted at the minute of sudden de-
mand, and well made or ill made, as chance would
have it; phonograph is one of these; dime is
another; and typewriter is a third. Some of
them are old words wrenched to a new use,
like elevator = "storehouse for grain," and like
ticker =" telegraphic printing-machine." Some
of them are taken from foreign tongues, either
translated, like statehouse (from the Dutch), or
unchanged, like prairie (from the French), adobe
(from the Spanish), and stoop (from the Dutch).
Some of them are borrowed from the rude
tongues of our predecessors on this continent,
like moccasin and tomahawk and wigwam. To
be compared with this last group are the words
adopted into English from the native languages
of India— punka, for example. And I make no
doubt that the Australians have taken over from
the aborigines round about them more than one
word needed in a hurry as a name for something
until then nameless in our common language
because the something itself was until then un-
known or unnoticed. But these Australian con-

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

tributions to English cannot be called Australian-
isms any more than telephone and prairie and
wigwam can be called Americanisms.

So far the attempt has been here made to sub-
tract from the immense and heterogeneous mass
of so-called Americanisms three classes of terms
falsely so called: first, the mere individualisms,
for which America as a whole has a right to shirk
the responsibility; second, the survivals in the
United States of words and usages that happen
to have fallen into abeyance in Great Britain ; and,
third, the American contributions to the English
language. As to each of these three groups the
case is clear enough; but as to a fourth group,
which ought also to be deducted, one cannot
speak with quite so much confidence.

This group would include the peculiarities of
speech existing sporadically in this or that special
locality and contributing what are often called
the American dialects— the Yankee dialect first
of all, then the dialect of the Appalachian moun-
taineers, the dialect of the Western cow-boys, etc.
Are these localisms fairly to be classed as Ameri-
canisms ? The question, so far as I know, has
never been raised before, for it has been taken
for granted that if any such things as American-
isms existed at all, they could surely be collected
from the mouth of Hosea Biglow. And yet if
we pause to think, we cannot but admit that the

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

so-called Yankee dialect is local, that it is un-
known outside of New England, and that a ma-
jority of the inhabitants of the United States find
it almost as strange in their ears as the broad
Scotch of Burns. As for the so-called dialect of
the cow-boy, it is not a true dialect at all ; it is
simply carelessly colloquial English with a heavy
infusion of fugitive slang; and whatever it may
be in itself, it is local to the cow-country. The
Appalachian dialect is perhaps more like a true
dialect; but it is even less wide-spread than either
of the others here picked out for consideration.
No one of these three alleged dialects is in
any sense national; all three of them are nar-
rowly local— altho the New England speech has
spread more or less into the middle west.

Perhaps some light on this puzzle may be had
by considering how they regard a similar problem
in England itself. The local dialects which still
abound throughout the British Isles are under
investigation, each by itself. No one has ever
suggested the lumping of them all together as
Briticisms. Indeed, the very definition of Briticism
would debar this. What is a Briticism but a term
frequently used throughout Great Britain and not
accepted in the United States ? And if this de-
finition is acceptable, we are forced to declare
that an Americanism is a term frequently used
throughout the United States and not accepted in

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

Great Britain. The terms of the Yankee dialect,
of the Appalachian, and of the cow-boy, are lo-
calisms; they are not frequently used throughout
the United States; they are not to be classed as
Americanisms any more than the cockney idioms,
the Wessex words, and the Yorkshire phrases
are to be classed as Briticisms.

It is greatly to be regretted that Dr. Murray
and Mr. Bradley and the other editors of the com-
prehensive Oxford Dictionary have not been so
careful as they might be in identifying the local-
ity of American dialectic peculiarities. They
have taken great pains to record and circumscribe
British dialectic peculiarities; but they are in the
habit of appending a vague and misleading (U. S.)
to such American words and usages as they may
set down. It is to be hoped that they may here-
after aim at a greater exactness in their attribu-
tions, since their present practice is quite mis-
leading, as it often suggests that a term is a true
Americanism, used freely throughout the United
States, when it is perhaps merely an individualism
or at best a localism.

Of true Americanisms there are not so very
many left, when we have ousted from their
usurped places these four groups of terms having
no real title to the honorable name. And true
Americanisms might be subdivided again into
two groups, the one containing the American

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

terms for which there are equivalent Briticisms,
thus indicating a divergence of usage, and the
other including only the words and phrases which
have sprung up here without correlative activity
on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the attempt is made to set up parallel
columns of Briticisms and Americanisms, each
more or less equal to the other, it is with sur-
prise that we discover how few of these equiva-
lencies there are. In other words, the variations
of usage between Great Britain and the United
States are infrequent. In England the railway
was preceded by the stage-coach, and in America
the railroad was preceded rather by the river
steamboat; and probably this accounts for the
slight differentiation observable in the vocabulary
of the traveler. But this is not the reason why
we in America make misuse of a French word,
dfyot, while the British prefer the Latin word
terminus, —restricting its application accurately to
the terminal station of a line. In England they
name him a guard whom we in America name
brakeman or trainman; and it is to be noted that
when Stevenson was an Amateur Emigrant he
sought to use the word of the country and so
mentions the brakesman— thus proving again the
difficulty of attaining exactness in local usage.
The British call that a goods-train which we call
a freight-train; and they speak of a crossing-plate

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

when they mean what we know as a frog. In
the United States a sleeping-car is often termed
a sleeper, whereas in Great Britain what they call
a sleeper is what we here call a tie. They say a key-
less watch where we say a stem-winder. They
say leader where we say editorial. They call that
a lift which we call an elevator; and we call him
a farm-hand whom they call an agricultural
laborer. They have even borrowed one Ameri-
canism, caucus, and made it a Briticism by
changing its meaning to signify what we are
wont to describe as the machine or the organi-
^ation. It is to be noted also that corn in Eng-
land refers to wheat and in America to mai^e;
and that in Great Britain calico is a plain cotton
cloth and in the United States a printed cotton
cloth.

This list of correlative Americanisms and Bri-
ticisms might be extended, of course; but how-
ever sweeping our investigations may be we
cannot make it very long. Far longer is the list
of American words and phrases and usages for
which there is no British equivalent— far too long,
indeed, for inclusion in this essay. All that can
be done here and now is to pick up a surface
specimen or two from the outcroppings to show
the quality of the vein. For instance, the vocabu-
lary of the university is largely indigenous— altho
we have recently borrowed a British vulgarism,
iij.

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

speaking now of the varsity team and the "varsity
crew. Campus seems to be unknown to the
British, and so does sophomoric, a most useful
epithet understood at once all over the United
States. Its absence from the British vocabulary
is probably due to the fact that the four-year
course of the old-fashioned American college is
unknown in England, where there are freshmen
indeed, but no sophomores.

Going out from the academic groves to the
open air of the wider West, as so many of our
college graduates do every year, we meet with a
host of Americanisms vigorous with the free life
of the great river and of the grand mountains.
But is bla^e—illo mark a trail through the
woods by chipping off bits of bark"— is this a
true Americanism ? Is it not rather an American
contribution to the English language ? Surely
every man in Africa or in Asia who wishes to
retrace his path through a virgin forest must
needs bla^e his way as he goes. But shack
=" a cabin of logs driven perpendicularly into the
ground "—this is a true Americanism undoubt-
edly. And its compound claim-shack =" a shack
built to hold a claim on a preemption "—this
is another true Americanism likely to puzzle
a British reader. Even preempt and preemp-
tion are probably Americanisms in that they
have with us a meaning somewhat different from
116

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

that they may have on the other side of the At-
lantic. Another true Americanism, which comes
to us from the plains, is mavericks="the un-
branded cattle at large to become the property
of the first ranch-owner whose men may chance
upon them." And ranch, while it is itself a con-
tribution to the language, has usages in which it
is an Americanism merely— as in the Californian
ben-ranch, for example.

There is a large freedom about the Western
vernacular and a swift directness not elsewhere
observable in the English language, whether in
the United States or in the British Empire. These
are most valuable qualities, and they are likely to
be of real service to English in helping to refresh
the jaded vocabulary of more scholarly commu-
nities. The function of slang as a true feeder of
language is certain to get itself more widely re-
cognized as time goes on ; and there is no better
nursery for these seedlings of speech than the
territory west of the Mississippi and east of the
Rockies. To say this is not to say that there are
not to be found east of the Mississippi many in-
teresting locutions still inadequately established
in the language. For example, there are three
words applied to the same thing in different parts
of the East; perhaps they ought to be styled lo-
calisms, but as they would be comprehended all
over the United States, they are probably entitled
117

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

to be received as true Americanisms— if, on the
other hand, they are not in fact good old English
words. A pass through the hills is often called
a notch in the White Mountains, a clove in the
Catskills, and a gap in the Blue Ridge. Yet
even as I write this I have my doubts as to
there being any narrow geographical delimitation
of usage, since I can recall a Parker Notch in the
Catskills, not far from Stony Clove and Kaaters-
kill Clove.

One of the best known of true Americanisms
is lumber =" timber." When we speak of
the lumbering industry we mean not only the
cutting down of trees and their sawing up into
planks, but also their marketing. From the ap-
parent participle lumbering a verb has been
made to lumber— & not uncommon process in
the history of the language, one British analog
being the making of the verb to bant from the
innocent name of Mr. Banting. To lumber is
apparently now used in the sense of to deforest,
if we may rely on a newspaper paragraph which
informed us that a certain tract of twenty-five
thousand acres in the Adirondacks had " been
lumbered, but not in such a way as to injure it
for a park." The verb to launder =" to wash,"
has been revived of late in America, if indeed it
has not been made anew from the noun laundry ;
and shirt-makers in their price-lists specify whe-

118

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

ther the shirts are to be sold laundered or un-
laundered. And to the word laundry itself has
been given a further extension of meaning. In
New York, at least, —and the verbal fashions of
the metropolis spread swiftly throughout the
Union,— it signifies not only the place where
personal linen is washed but the personal linen
itself. An advertisement in a college magazine
informed the lone student that " gentlemen's
laundry" was "mended free."

When an American student of English printed
a collection of Briticisms in which more than one
strange wild fowl of speech had been snared on
the wing in newspapers and advertisements, Mr.
Andrew Lang protested against the acceptance of
phrases so gathered as representative Briticisms;
and it is only fair to admit that they represented
colloquial or industrial rather than literary usage.
Yet they were interesting in that they gave us a
glimpse of the actual speech of the common peo-
ple—just such a glimpse, in fact, as we get from
the Roman inscriptions. This actual speech of
the people, whether in Rome or in London or in
New York, is the real language, of which the
literary dialect is but a sublimation. Language
is born in the mouth, altho it dies young un-
less it is brought up by hand. Language is made
sometimes in the library, it is true, and in the
parlor also, but far more often in the workshop
119

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

and on the sidewalk; and nowadays the news-
paper and the advertisement record for us the
simple and unstilted phrases of the workshop
and the sidewalk.

The most of these will fade out of sight unre-
gretted; but a few will prove themselves pos-
sessed of sturdy vitality. Briticisms, it may be,
or Americanisms, as it happens, they will fight
their way up from the workshop to the library,
from the sidewalk to the study. Born in a single
city, they will serve usefully throughout a great
nation, and perhaps in the end all over the world,
wherever our language is spoken.

The ideal of style, so it has been tersely put,
is the speech of the people in the mouth of the
scholar. One reason why so much of the aca-
demic writing of educated men is arid is because
it is as remote as may be from the speech of the
people. One reason why Mark Twain and Rud-
yard Kipling are now the best-beloved authors of
the English language is because they have each
of them a welcome ear for the speech of the
people. Mark Twain abounds in true American-
isms ; on the other hand, Rudyard Kipling is spar-
ing of real Briticisms— having, indeed, a certain
hankering after Americanisms. Kipling's case is
not unlike that of y^Eschylus, who was a native
of Greece but a frequent resident in Sicily, and in
whose vocabulary occasional Sicilianisms have

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

been found by the keen-eyed German critics.
So Plautus greedily availed himself of the vigor-
ous fertility he discovered in the vocabulary of
the Roman populace; and when Cicero went to
the works of Plautus for the words he needed,
we had once more the speech of the people in
the mouth of the scholar.

Something of the toploftiness of the elder rheto-
ricians yet lingers in the tone many British writers
of to-day see fit to adopt whenever they take oc-
casion to discuss the use of the English language
here in America. A trenchant critic like Mr.
Frederic Harrison, in a lecture on the masters of
style, went out of his way to warn his hearers
that though they might be familiar in their writ-
ing they were by no means to be vulgar. " At
any rate, be easy, colloquial if you like, but shun
those vocables which come to us across the At-
lantic, or from Newmarket and Whitechapel."
This linking of America and Whitechapel may
seem to us to be rather vulgar than familiar; and
it was Goethe— a master of style well known to
Mr. Harrison— who reminded us that " when
self-esteem expresses itself in contempt of an-
other, be he the meanest, it must be repellant."
It is only fair to say that fewer British writers
than ever before sink to so low a level as this;
and it is right to admit that a definite recognition
of the American joint-ownership of the Eng-

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

lish language is not now so rare as once it was
in England.

Not often, however, do we find so frank and
ungrudging acknowledgment of the exact truth
as is to be found in Mr. William Archer's ' Amer-
ica To-day.' Part of one of the Scotch critic's
paragraphs calls for quotation here because it
sets forth, perhaps more clearly and concisely
than any American has yet dared to do, what the
facts of the case really are :

" There can be no rational doubt, I think, that
the English language has gained, and is gaining,
enormously by its expansion over the American
continent. The prime function of a language,
after all, is to interpret the ' form and pressure '
of life— the experience, knowledge, thought,
emotion, and aspiration of the race which em-
ploys it. This being so, the more tap-roots a
language sends down into the soil of life, and
the more varied the strata of human experience
from which it draws its nourishment, whether of
vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be its
potentialities as a medium of expression. We
must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism
healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue;
but to that duty American writers are quite as
keenly alive as we. It is not a source of weak-
ness but of power and vitality to the English lan-
guage that it should embrace a greater variety of

122

AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE

dialects than any other civilized tongue. A new
language, says the proverb, is a new sense ; but
a multiplicity of dialects means, for the posses-
sors of the main language, an enlargement of the
pleasures of the linguistic sense without the fa-
tigue of learning a totally new grammar and
vocabulary. So long as there is a potent literary
tradition keeping the core of the language one
and indivisible, vernacular variations can only
tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to
promote the abundance, suppleness, and nicety
of adaptation of the language as a literary instru-
ment. The English language is no mere historic
monument, like Westminster Abbey, to be reli-
giously preserved as a relic of the past, and rever-
enced as the burial-place of a bygone breed of
giants. It is a living organism, ceaselessly busied,
like any other organism, in the processes of assim-
ilation and excretion."

('899)

123

VI

NEW WORDS AND OLD

NEW WORDS AND OLD

NOT long before the opening of the splendid
exhibition which, for the short space of six
months, made Chicago the most interesting city
in the world, its leading literary journal editorially
rejoiced that English was becoming a world-lan-
guage, but sorrowed also that it was sadly in
danger of corruption, especially from the piebald
jargon of our so-called dialect stories. Not long
before the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of
Queen Victoria a notorious sensation-monger of
London, having founded a review in which to
exploit himself, proclaimed that English was in
a parlous state, and that something ought to be
done at once or the language would surely die.
The Chicago editor was grieved at the sorry con-
dition of our language in the United States, while
the London editor wept over its wretched plight
in Great Britain. The American journalist called
upon us to take, pattern by the British ; and the
British journalist cried out for an Academy like
that of the French to lay down laws for the

NEW WORDS AND OLD

speaking of our mother-tongue—intending per-
haps to propose later the revival of the pillory or
of the ducking-stool for those who shall infringe
the stringent provisions of the new code.

There is nothing novel in these shrill outbreaks,
which serve only to alarm the timid and to reveal
an unhesitating ignorance of the history of our
language. The same kind of protest has been
made constantly ever since English has been re-
cognized as a tongue worthy of preservation and
protection ; and it would be easy to supply paral-
lels without number, some of them five hundred
years old. A single example will probably suffice.
In Steele's ' Tatler ' Swift wrote a letter denoun-
cing "the deplorable ignorance that for some
years hath reigned among our English writers,
the great depravity of our taste, and the continual
corruption of our style." Here we find the ' Tat-
ler ' (of London) in the first decade of the eigh-
teenth century saying exactly what the ' Dial ' (of
Chicago) echoed in the last decade of the nine-
teenth. But the earlier writer had an excuse the
later writer was without ; Swift wrote before the
history of our language was understood.

We know now that growth is a condition of
life; and that only a dead language is rigid. We
know now that it is dangerous to elevate the
literary diction too far above the speech of the
plain people. We have found out that nobody
128

NEW WORDS AND OLD

in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin; Cicero did
not speak it himself; he did not even write it
naturally; he wrote it with an effort and not
always to his own satisfaction at the first attempt.
We have discovered that there was a wide gap
between the elegance of the orator's polished
periods and the uncouth bluntness of the vulgar
tongue of the Roman people ; and we believe that
this divergence was broader than that between
the perfect style of Hawthorne, for example,
and the every-day dialect of Salem or of Con-
cord.

By experts like Whitney we are told that there
has been less structural modification of our lan-
guage in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury than in any other fifty-year period of its
existence. Our vocabulary has been enormously
enriched, but the skeleton of our speech has been
only a little developed. With the decrease in
illiteracy the conserving force of the printing-
press must always hereafter make change in-
creasingly difficult— even in the obvious cases
where improvement is possible. The indirect
influence of the novelist and the direct influence
of the schoolmaster— very powerful each of them
and almost irresistible when united— will always
be exerted on the side of the conservatives. To
seize these facts firmly and to understand their
applications is to have ready always an ample
129

NEW WORDS AND OLD

answer for all those who chatter about the im-
pending corruption of our noble tongue.

But we may go further. The study of history
shows us that the future of English is dependent
not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not
upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its
vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syn-
tax, not upon the needed reform of its orthog-
raphy; it is not dependent upon any purity or
any corruption of the language itself. The future
of the English language is dependent upon the
future of the two great peoples that speak it; it
is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the
vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Ameri-
cans. A language is but the instrument of those
who use it; and English has flourished and spread
not because of its own merits, many as they are,
but because of the forthputting qualities of the
masterful English stock. It must rise and fall
with us who speak it. " No speech can do more
than express the ideas of those who employ it at
the time," so a recent historian of our language
has reminded us. " It cannot live upon its past
meanings, or upon the past conceptions of great
men that have been recorded in it, any more than
the race which uses it can live upon its past glory
or its past achievements."

When we have once possessed ourselves of
the inexorable fact that it is not in our power
130

NEW WORDS AND OLD

to warp the development of our language by any
conscious effort, we can listen with amused tol-
eration to the excited outcries of those who are
constantly protesting against this or that word or
phrase or usage which may seem to them new
and therefore unjustifiable. We discover also
that the self-appointed legislators who lay down
the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in
exact proportion to their ignorance of the history
of the language.

"Every word we speak," so Dr. Holmes told
us, " is the medal of a dead thought or feeling,
struck in the die of some human experience,
worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and al-
ways transferred warm from one to another."
We must admit that these chance medalists of
language have not always been gifted artists or
skilled craftsmen, so the words of their striking
are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always
respected the standard, so there is counterfeit
coin in circulation sometimes. Even when the
word is sterling and well minted, be it new or
old,

Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary,

the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the
reserve, to be misrepresented by a shabby paper
promise to pay. So fierce is the popular demand

NEW WORDS AND OLD

for an increased per capita that the verbal cur-
rency is ever in danger of debasement. This is
the apparent justification of the self-appointed
tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of
their own and who venture to throw out much
false coin. Their tests are trustworthy now and
again; but more often than not the pieces they
have nailed to the counter are of full weight and
ought to pass current.

"There is a purism," Whitney said, "which,
while it seeks to maintain the integrity of the
language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too
fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings,
familiar and colloquial expressions, is little less
fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue than
to rush into the opposite extreme." And Pro-
fessor Lounsbury goes further and asserts that
our language is not to-day in danger from the
agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it,
but rather " from ignorant efforts made to pre-
serve what is called its purity." And elsewhere
the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that
"the history of language is the history of cor-
ruptions," and that "the purest of speakers uses
every day, with perfect propriety, words and
forms which, looked at from the point of view
of the past, are improper, if not scandalous."

There would be both interest and instruction in
a list of the many words securely intrenched in
132

NEW WORDS AND OLD

our own vocabulary to-day Which were bitterly
assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises
himself for his valiant effort against certain of
these intruders: "I have done my utmost for
some years past to stop the progress of mob and
banter, but have been plainly borne down by
numbers and betrayed by those who promised to
assist me." Puttenham (or whoever it was that
wrote the anonymous 'Arte of English Poesie/
published in 1589) admitted the need of certain
words to which the purists might justly object,
and then adds that " many other like words bor-
rowed out of the Latin and French were not so
well to be allowed by us," citing then, among
those of which he disapproved, audacious,
egregious, and compatible. In the 'Poetaster,'
acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston's
verbal innovations, and among the words he
reviled are clumsy, inflate, spurious, conscious,
strenuous, defunct, retrograde, and reciprocal;
and in his ' Discoveries ' Jonson shrewdly re-
marked that " a man coins not a new word with-
out some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to
be received, the praise is but moderate; if re-
fused, the scorn is assured."

Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth
century, Jonson at the beginning of the seven-
teenth, Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth;
and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find
•33

NEW WORDS AND OLD

Lady Holland declaring influential to be a detest-
able word and asserting that she had tried in vain
to get Sheridan to forego it.

At the end of the nineteenth century the battle
was still raging over standpoint, for example, and
over reliable and over lengthy, and over a score
of others, all of which bid fair to establish them-
selves ultimately because they supply a demand
more or less insistent. The fate is more doubt-
ful of photo for photograph and of phone for tele-
phone ; they both strike us now as vulgarisms,
just as mob (and for the same reason) struck
Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in time they
will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as
mob has survived it. Then there is the misbe-
gotten verb, to enthuse, in my sight the most
hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate ?
Altho I have detected it in the careful col-
umns of the 'Nation,' it has not as yet been
adopted by any acknowledged master of Eng-
lish; none the less, I fear me greatly, it has all
the vitality of other ill weeds. And is bike going
to get itself recognized as a substitute for bicycle,
both as verb and as noun ? It seems to be pos-
sible, since a monosyllable has always an advan-
tage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths.

Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of
words " when we are already overloaded with
monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our lan-
'34

NEW WORDS AND OLD

guage." Then he wittily characterizes the pro-
cess by which mob had been made, cab was to
be made, and photo is now in the making : " Thus
we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the
owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their
legs to prevent them from running away; and if
ours be the same reason for maiming our words,
it will certainly answer the end: for I am sure
no other nation will desire to borrow them."
Swift was rash enough to assert that speculation,
operation, preliminaries, ambassador, communica-
tion, and battalion were words newly introduced,
and also to prophesy that they were too poly-
syllabic to be able to endure many more cam-
paigns. As it happens no attempt has been made
to shorten any one of them except speculation,
and it can hardly be maintained that spec has
established itself. Certainly it has not disestab-
lished speculation, as mob has driven out mobile
•vulgus.

Dryden declared that he traded " both with the
living and the dead for the enrichment of our
native language"; but he denied that he Latin-
ized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he
attempted have not won acceptance. Lowell
thought that Dryden did not add a single word
to the language, unless " he first used magnetism
in its present sense of moral attraction." Dr.
Holmes also discovered that it is not enough to
'35

NEW WORDS AND OLD

make a new word when it is needed and to fash-
ion it fitly; its fortune still depends on public
caprice or popular instinct. " I 've sometimes
made new words," he told a friend; " I made
chrysocracy, thinking it would take its place, but
it did n't; plutocracy, meaning the same thing,
was adopted instead. " But anesthesia is a word
of Dr. Holmes's making which has won its way
not only in English but in most of the other
modern languages. It may be doubted whether
a like fortune will follow another word to be
found quoted in one of his letters, aproposity, a
bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our
language.

It is with surprise that in Stevenson's very
Scotch romance ' David Balfour ' we happen upon
another malformation— come-at-able, hitherto sup-
posed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma.
Elsewhere in the same story we read " you claim
to be innocent," a form which the cockney critics
are wont to call American. Stevenson in this
novel uses both the modern jeopardise and the
ancient enjeopardy. Just why to jeopardise
should have driven to jeopard out of use, it is not
easy to declare, nor why leniency is supplanting
lenity. As drunk seems to suggest total intoxi-
cation, it is possible to discover the cause of the
increasing tendency to say " I have drank." No
defense is easy of in our midst for in the midst
136

NEW WORDS AND OLD

of us, and yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is
a convenient short-cut. Dr. Holmes confessed
to Richard Grant White that he had used it once,
and that Edward Everett (who had also once
fallen from grace) made him see the error of his
ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson's
'Amateur Emigrant,' and again in the ' Res Judi-
catae ' of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a brisk essayist,
altho not an impeccable stylist.

It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To
call it a neologism is but begging the question.
Of necessity every word was new once. It was
" struck in the die of human experience," to come
back to Dr. Holmes's figure; and it is at its best
before it is " worn smooth by innumerable con-
tacts." Lowell thought it was a chief element
of Shakspere's greatness that " he found words
ready to his use, original and untarnished— types
of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by
repeated impressions." He " found a language
already established but not yet fetlocked by dic-
tionary and grammar mongers." For the same
reason Merimee delighted in Russian, because it
was "young, the pedants not having had time
to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry."

This native relish for the uncontaminated word

it was that led Hugo and Gautier to ransack all

sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for the

unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rud-

>37

NEW WORDS AND OLD

yard Kipling to avail himself of the technical
terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not
merely because they are exact, but also because
they are unexpected. The device is dangerous,
no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions can
find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot
was a little too fond of injecting into fiction the
terminology of science, but there was nothing
blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabu-
lary which should be at the command of the
novelist. Professor Dowden records that when
she used in a story words and phrases like dy-
namic and natural selection, the reviewer pricked
up his delicate ears and shied ; and he makes bold
to suggest that " if the thoroughbred critic could
only be led close up to dynamic, he would find
that dynamic would not bite." Every lover of
our language will sympathize with Professor
Dowden's assertion that " a protest of common
sense is really called for against the affectation
which professes to find obscurity in words be-
cause they are trisyllabic or because they carry
with them scientific associations. Language, the
instrument of literary art, is an instrument of
ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in
an age when the air is saturated with scientific
thought, would be to reject those accessions to
the language which are the special gain of the
time."

138

NEW WORDS AND OLD

Where George Eliot erred— if err she did at all
in this matter— was in the use of scientific terms
inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully, whereby
she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the
purpose in hand. Every writer needs to consider
most carefully both the obvious and the remote
associations of the phrases he employs, that these
may intensify the thought he wishes to convey.
A word is known by the company it has kept.
Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the
fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor.
The magic of his art lies largely in the syllables
he selects, in their sound and in their color. Not
their meanings merely are important to him, but
their suggestions also— not what they denote
more than what they connote. An American
psychologist has recently told us that every word
has not only its own note but also its overtones.
With unconscious foresight, the great poets have
always acted on this theory.

Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have
ever been ready to rescue a cast-off word from
the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle
(of Oxford) declares that " it has been one of the
most interesting features of the new vigor and
independence of American literature, that it has
often displayed in a surprising manner what
springs of novelty there are in reserve and to be
elicited by novel combinations"— a statement
'39

NEW WORDS AND OLD

more complimentary in its intent than felicitous
in its phrasing. And Professor Earle praises
Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill
in enriching our modern English with the old
words locked up out of sight in the treasuries of
the past. Lowell said of Emerson that " his eye
for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is
like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he
will dredge you up a choice word from the mud
of Cotton Mather himself."

Of course this effort to recover the scattered
pearls of speech, dropped by the wayside in the
course of the centuries, is peculiar neither to the
United States nor to the nineteenth century —
altho perhaps it has been carried further in our
country and in our time than anywhere else.
Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old
Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused
by an acrid critic of having made a list of obsolete
words, which he strove deliberately to reintroduce
into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought
to do with Chaucer's vocabulary; and it is curious
to reflect that, owing, it may be, in part, to the
example set by the author of the 'Faerie Queene,'
the language of the ' Canterbury Tales ' is far
less strange, less remote, less archaic to us to-day
than it was to the Elizabethans.

A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going
on constantly. Words are swiftly worn out and
140

NEW WORDS AND OLD

used up and thrown aside. New words are
made or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old
words are impressed into service and forced to
do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary
completed than the editor sets about his inevi-
table supplement. And the dictionary is not only
of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate in
its definitions, for it may happen that a word will
take on an added meaning while the big book
is at the bindery. Our language is fluctuating
always ; and now one word and now another has
expanded its content or has shrunk away into
insignificance. No definition is surely stable for
long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of
his own style disgust was fairly equivalent to
dislike ; " and if a more massy way of writing be
never so much disgusted at this day, a better
gust will come on."

Once upon a time to aggravate meant to in-
crease an offense; now it is often used as tho
it meant to irritate. Formerly calculated— as in
the sentence " it was calculated to do harm "—
implied a deliberate intention to injure; now the
idea of intention has been eliminated and the
sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to " it
was likely to do harm." Verbal is slowly get-
ting itself accepted as synonymous with oral, in
antithesis to written. Lurid was really pale, wan,
ghastly ; but how often of late has it been em-
141

NEW WORDS AND OLD

ployed as tho it signified red or ruddy or
bloody ?

At first these new uses of these old words
were slovenly and inadmissible inaccuracies, but
by sheer insistence they are winning their par-
don, until at last they will gain authority as they
broaden down from precedent to precedent. It
is well to be off with the old word before you
are on with the new; and no writer who re-
spects his mother-tongue is ever in haste to take
up with words thus wrested from the primitive
propriety.

But, as Dryden declared when justifying his
modernizing of Chaucer's vocabulary, " Words
are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be
removed; customs are changed, and even statutes
are silently repealed when the reason ceases for
which they were enacted." It was Dryden's
" Cousin Swift " who once declared that " a nice
man is a man of nasty ideas "—an assertion
which I venture to believe to be wholly incom-
prehensible to-day to the young ladies of Eng-
land in whose mouths nice means agreeable and
nasty means disagreeable. Nice has suffered this
inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States
as well as in Great Britain, but nasty has not yet
been emptied of its original offensiveness here as
it has over there. And even in British speech the
transformation is relatively recent ; I think Steven-
142

NEW WORDS AND OLD

son was guilty of an anachronism in 'Weir of
Hermiston ' when he put it in the mouth of a
young Scot.

If the Scotch have followed the evil example
of the English in misusing nasty, the English in
turn have twisted the ilk of North Britain to
serve their own ends. Of that ilk is a phrase
added to a man's surname to show that this
name and the name of his estate are the same;
thus Bradwardine of Bradwardine would be
called " Bradwardine of that ilk." But it is not
uncommon now to see a phrase like " people of
that ilk," meaning obviously "people of that
sort."

In like manner awful and terrible and elegant
have been so misused as mere intensives that a
careful writer now strikes them out when they
come off the end of his pen in their original
meaning. So quite no longer implies completely
but is almost synonymous with somewhat—
quite poor meaning somewhat poor and quite
good meaning pretty good. Unique is getting to
imply merely excellent or perhaps only unusual;
its exact etymological value is departing forever.
Creole, which should be applied only to Cauca-
sian natives of tropical countries born of Latin
parents, is beginning to carry with it in the vul-
gar tongue of to-day a vague suspicion of negro
blood.

«43

NEW WORDS AND OLD

While the perversion of nice and nasty \s British,
there is an American perversion of dirt not unlike
it. To most Americans, I think, dirt suggests
earth or soil or clay or dust; to most Americans,
I think, dirt no longer carries with it any sug-
gestion of dirtiness. I have heard a mother
send her little boy off to make mud-pies on con-
dition that he used only "clean dirt" \ and I
know that a lawn-tennis ground of compacted
earth is called a dirt court. Yet, tho the noun
has thus been defecated, the adjective keeps
its earlier force; and there even lingers some-
thing of the pristine value in the noun itself
when it is employed in the picturesque idiom
of the Rocky Mountains, where to be guilty of
an underhand injury against any one is to do
him dirt. Lovers of Western verse will recall
how the frequenters of Casey's table d'hote
went to see " Modjesky as Cameel," and how
they sat in silence until the break occurs between
the lover and his mistress :

At that Three-fingered Hoover says: "I '11 chip into this game,
And see if Red Hoss Mountain cannot reconstruct the same.
I won't set by and see the feelin's of a lady hurt—
Gol durn a critter, anyhow, that does a woman dirt ! "

Here no doubt, we have crossed the confines
of slang; but having done so, I venture upon an
anecdote which will serve to show how com-
•44

NEW WORDS AND OLD

pletely sometimes the newer meaning of a word
substitutes itself for the older. Two friends of
mine were in a train of the elevated railroad,
passing through that formerly craggy part of
upper New York which was once called Shanty-
town and which now prefers to be known as
Harlem. One of them drew the attention of the
other to the capering young capricorns that
sported over the blasted rocks by the side of the
lofty track. "Just look at those kids," were the
words he used. He was overheard by a boy of
the streets sitting in the next seat, who glanced
out of the window at once, but failed to discover
the children he expected to behold. Whereupon
he promptly looked up and corrected my friend.
"Them 's not kids," declared the urchin of Man-
hattan; "them 's little goats! " In the mind of
this native youngster there was no doubt at all
as to the meaning of the word kid ; to him it
meant child ; and he would have scorned any
explanation that it ever had meant young goat.

In ignorance is certainty, and with increase of
wisdom comes hesitancy. For example, what
does the word romantic really mean ? Few ad-
jectives are harder worked in the history of
modern literature; and no two of those who use
it would agree upon its exact context. It sug-
gests one set of circumstances to the student of
English literature, a second set to a student of

NEW WORDS AND OLD

German literature, and a third to a student of
French literature; while every student of com-
parative literature must echo Professor Kuno
Francke's longing for "the formation of an in-
ternational league for the suppression of the
terms both romanticism and classicism."

Other words there are almost as ambiguous—
philology, for example, and college and chapel.
By classical philology we understand the study
of all that survives of the civilizations of Greece
and Rome, their languages, their literature, their
laws, their arts. But has Romance philology or
Germanic philology so broad a basis ? Has Eng-
lish philology ? To nine out of ten of us, this use
of the word now seems to put stress on the
study of linguistics as against the study of liter-
ature; to ninety-nine out of a hundred, I think,
philologist suggests the narrow student of lin-
guistics; and therefore the wider meaning seems
likely soon to fall into innocuous desuetude.

The change in the application of college is still
in process of accomplishment. In England a
college was a place of instruction, sometimes
independent (as Eton College, in which case it is
really a high school) and sometimes a compo-
nent part of a university (in which case the rest
of the organization is not infrequently non-exis-
tent). An English university is not unlike a
federation of colleges ; and the relation of Merton
146

NEW WORDS AND OLD

and Magdalen to Oxford is not unlike that of
Massachusetts and Virginia to the United States.
In America college and university were long
carelessly confused, as tho they were intercon-
vertible terms; but of late a sharp distinction is
being set up— a distinction quite different from
that obtaining in England. In this new Ameri-
can usage, a college is a place where undergradu-
ates are trained, and a university is a place where
graduate-students are guided in research. Thus
the college gives breadth, and the university adds
depth. Thus the college provides general culture
and the university provides the opportunity of
specialization. If we accept this distinction, —
and it has been accepted by all those who discuss
the higher education in America, — we are forced
to admit that the most of the self-styled univer-
sities of this country should be called colleges;
and we are allowed to observe that the college
and the university can exist side by side in the
same institution, as at Harvard and at Columbia.
We are forced also to admit that what is known
in Great Britain as " University Extension " can-
not fairly retain that title here in the United
States, since its object is not the extension of
university work, as we now understand the
word university here; it is at most the extension
of college work.

While this modification of the meaning of col-
M7

NEW WORDS AND OLD

lege is being made in America, a modification of
chapel has been made in England. At first
chapel described a subordinate part of a church,
devoted to special services. By natural extension
it came to denote a smaller edifice subsidiary to
a large church, as Grace Church, in New York,
was once a chapel of Trinity Church. But in the
nineteenth century chapel came to be applied in
England especially to the humbler meeting-houses
of the various sects of dissenters, while church is
reserved for the places of worship of the estab-
lished religion. Thus Sir Walter Besant classifies
the population of a riverside parish in London
into those who go to church and those who go
to chapel, having no doubt that all his British
readers will understand the former to be Episco-
palians and the latter Methodists or the like.

This is a Briticism not likely ever to be adopted
in America. But another Briticism bids fair to
have a better fortune. Living as they do on a
little group of islands, the British naturally are in
the habit of referring to the rest of Europe as the
Continent. They run across the Channel to take
a little tour "on the Continent." They speak of
the pronunciation of Latin that obtains every-
where but in Great Britain and Ireland as the
continental pronunciation. When they wish to
differentiate their authors, for instance, from the
French and the German and the Italians, they
148

NEW WORDS AND OLD

lump these last together as the continental authors.
The division of Europe into continental and
British is so convenient that it is certain to be
adopted on this side of the Atlantic. Already has
a New York literary review, after having had a
series of papers on " Living Critics " (in which
were included both British writers and American),
followed it with a series of " Living Continental
Critics " (in which the chief critics of France,
Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia were consid-
ered). Yet there is no logic in this use of the
word over here, since we Americans are not in-
sular; and since North America is a continent just
as Europe is. As it happens, the word continen-
tal in a wholly contradictory meaning is glorious
in the history of the United States. Who does
not know how,

In their ragged regimentals,
Stood the old Continentals,
Yielding not ?

None the less will the convenience of this
British use of the word outweigh its lack of logic
in America— as convenience has so often over-
ridden far more serious considerations. Lan-
guage is only a tool, after all; and it must ever
be shaped to fit the hand that uses it. This is
why another illogical misuse of a word will get
itself recognized as legitimate sooner or later—
149

NEW WORDS AND OLD

the limitations of American to mean only that
which belongs to the United States. When we
speak of American ideas we intend to exclude
not only the ideas of South America but also
those of Mexico and of Canada; we are really
arrogating to ourselves a supremacy so over-
whelming as to warrant our ignoring altogether
all the other peoples having a right to share in
the adjective. Our reason for this is that there
is no national adjective available for us. We can
speak of Mexican ideas and of Canadian ideas ;
but we cannot— or at least we do not and we
will not— speak of United Statesian ideas. And
this appropriation to ourselves of an adjective
really the property of all the inhabitants of the
continent seems to be perfectly acceptable to the
only other group of those inhabitants speaking
our language,— the English colonists to the north
of us. On both sides of the Niagara River the
smaller brother of the gigantic Horseshoe cataract
is known as the "American fall." Even in the
last century the British employed American to
indicate the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies ;
and Dr. Johnson wrote in 1 775 : " That the Ameri-
cans are able to bear taxation is indubitable."
But our ownership of American as a national
adjective, if tolerated by the Canadians and the
British, is not admitted by those who do not
speak our language. Probably to both the Ital-
150

NEW WORDS AND OLD

ians and the Spaniards South America rather than
North is the part of the world that rises in the
mental vision when the word American is sud-
denly pronounced.

Another distinction not unlike this, but logical
as well as convenient, is getting itself recognized.
This distinction results from accepting the
obvious fact that the literature of the English
language has nowadays two independent divi-
sions—that produced in the British Isles and that
produced in the United States. The writers of
both nations speak the English language, and
therefore their works— whensoever these rise to
the level of literature— belong to English litera-
ture. We are wont to call one division Ameri-
can literature, and we are beginning to see that
logic will soon force us to call the other division
British literature. Mr. Stedman has dealt with
the poetry of the English language of the past
sixty years in two volumes, one on the ' Vic-
torian Poets,' and the other on the 'Poets of
America,' and this serves to show how sharp is
the line of separation. With his customary care-
fulness of epithet, Mr. Stedman in the preface to
the earlier volume always uses British as the
antithesis of American, reserving English as the
broader adjective to cover both branches of our
literature. Probably the many collections of the
' British Poets,' the ' British Novelists,' the ' British

NEW WORDS AND OLD

Theater,' were so called to allow the inclusion of
works produced in the sister kingdoms ; it is well
to remember that Scott and Moore were neither
of them Englishmen. There is a certain piquancy
in the fact that the adjective British, available in
the beginning of the nineteenth century because
it included the Scotch and the Irish, is even more
useful at the end of the nineteenth century be-
cause it differentiates the English, Scotch, and
Irish, taken all together, from the Americans.

Telegram was denounced as a mismade word,
and cablegram was rejected with abhorrence by
all defenders of purity. Yet the firm establish-
ment of telegraph and telephone made certain the
ultimate acceptance of telegram. But cablegram
is still on probation, and may fail of admission in
the end, perhaps, because a part of the word
seems to be better fitted for its purpose than the
whole. A message received by the telegraph
under the ocean is often curtly called a cable, as
when a man says, " I 've just had a cable from
my wife in Paris." This, I think, is rather
American than British; but it is akin to the
British use of wire as synonymous with both
telegram and to telegraph. An Englishman invites
you to a house-party, and writes that he will meet
you at the station " on a wire," intending to con-
vey to you his desire that you should telegraph
him the hour of your arrival. In a short story by
152

NEW WORDS AND OLD

Mr. Henry James, that most conscientious of
recorders of British speech, he tells us that after
wires and counterwires one of the characters of
his tale was at last able to arrive at the house
where the action takes place. The locution is
hot from the verbal foundry; and it seems to
imply what an American writer would have ex-
pressed by saying that there had been "tele-
graphing to and fro."

American, probably, is the verb to process, and
also its past participle processed. When new
methods of photo-engraving were introduced
here in the United States, a black-and-white
artist would express a preference either to have
his drawing engraved on wood or have it repro-
duced mechanically by a photo-engraving pro-
cess; and as he needed a brief word to describe
this latter act, one was promptly forthcoming,
and he asked, " Is this thing of mine to be
engraved or processed?" The word half-tone
seems also to be of American manufacture; and
it describes one of these methods of photo-en-
graving. It is not only a noun, but also, on occa-
sions, a verb; and the artist will ask if his wash-
drawing is to be half-toned. Of necessity the
several improvements in the art of photo-engrav-
ing brought with them a variety of new terms
absolutely essential in the terminology of the
craft, most of them remaining hidden in the

NEW WORDS AND OLD

technical vocabulary, altho now and again one
or another has thrust itself up into the general
language.

Any attempt to declare the British or the
American origin of an idiom is most precarious;
and he who ventures upon it has need of double
caution. When a friend of mine asked the boy
at the door of the club if it was still raining, and
was answered, "No, sir; it 's fairing up now,"
he was at first inclined to think that he had cap-
tured an Americanism hitherto unknown and
delightfully fresh ; but he consulted the Century
Dictionary, only to find that it was a Scoticism,
—there was even a quotation from Stevenson's
' Inland Voyage, '—and that it was not uncommon
in the southwestern states. And when Captain
Mahan brought out the difference between pre-
paration for war and preparedness for war, this
friend was ready to credit the naval historian with
the devising not only of a most valuable distinc-
tion but also of a most useful word; but a dip
into the Century Dictionary again revealed that
a Scotchman had not waited for an American to
use the word, and that it had been employed by
Bain, not even as tho it was a novelty.

Once in the pages of Hawthorne, who was

affluent in words and artistically adroit in his

management of them, I met a phrase that pleased

me mightily, " a beterogeny of things " ; and I find

'54

NEW WORDS AND OLD

heterogeny duly collected in the Century Dic-
tionary but without any quotation from Haw-
thorne. Another word of Hawthorne's in the
' Blithedale Romance ' is improvability : " In my
own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think
better of the world's improvability than it de-
served." This I fancy may be Hawthorne's very
own; but it is in the Century Dictionary, all
the same, and without any indication of its origin.
Quite possibly the New England romancer dis-
interred it from some forgotten tome of the
"somniferous school of literature," as he had
humorously entitled the writings of his theologi-
cal ancestors.

There is a word of Abraham Lincoln's that I
long for the right to use. Mr. Noah Brooks has
recorded that he once heard the President speak
of a certain man as interruptions. This adjective
conveys a delicate shade of meaning not discov-
erable in any other; it may not be inscribed in
the bead-roll of the King's English, but it was
a specimen of the President's English; and has
any Speech from the Throne in this century
really rivaled the force and felicity of the Second
Inaugural ?

It was not the liberator of the negro but one of

the freedmen themselves who made offhand use

of a delicious word, for which it is probably

hopeless for us to expect acceptance, however

>55

NEW WORDS AND OLD

useful the new term might prove. During a
debate in the legislature of South Carolina in the
Reconstruction days, a sable ally of the carpet-
baggers rose to repel the taunts of his opponents,
declaring energetically that he hurled back with
scorn all their insinuendos. The word holds a
middle ground between insinuation and innu-
endo ; and between the two it has scant chance
of survival. But it is an amusing attempt, for all
its failure; and it would have given pleasure to
the author of ' Alice in Wonderland.' And how
many of Lewis Carroll's own verbal innovations,
wantonly manufactured for his sport, are likely
to get themselves admitted into the language of
literature ? Chortle stands the best chance of
them all, I think; and I believe that many a man
has said that he chortled, with no thought of the
British bard who ingeniously devised the quaint
vocable.

So Mr. W. S. Gilbert's burgle seems to be win-
ning its way into general use. At first those who
employed it followed the example of the comic
lyrist, and did so with humorous intent; but of
late it is beginning to serve those who are wholly
devoid of humor. Perhaps the verb to burgle
(from the noun burglar) supplied the analogy on
which was made the verb to ush (from the noun
usher). With my own ears I once heard a well-
known clergyman in New York express the
156

NEW WORDS AND OLD

thanks of the congregation to " the gentlemen
who usb for us."

It is well that strange uses like these do not
win early acceptance into our speech— that there
should be alert challengers at the portal to cry
"Halt!" and to examine a newcomer's creden-
tials. It is well also that the stranger should
have leave to prove his usefulness and so in time
gain admittance even to the inner sanctuary of
the language. John Dryden discussed the recep-
tion into English of new words and phrases with
the sturdy common sense which was one of the
characteristics most endearing him to us as a true
type of the man of letters who was also a man of
the world. "It is obvious," he wrote in his
'Defense of the Epilog,' "that we have admitted
many, some of which we wanted, and therefore
our language is the richer for them, as it would
be by importation of bullion; others are rather
ornamental than necessary; yet by their admis-
sion the language is become more courtly and
our thoughts are better dressed."

Historians of the language have had no diffi-
culty in bringing together a mass of quotations^
from the British writers of the eighteenth cen-
tury to show that they were then possessed of
the belief that it was feasible and necessary to set
bounds to the growth of English. They were
afraid that the changes going on in the language
»57

NEW WORDS AND OLD

would make it " impossible for succeeding ages
to read or appreciate the literature produced."
In his interesting and instructive lecture on the
' Evolution of English Lexicography,' Dr. Murray
remarks that " to us of a later age, with our fuller
knowledge of the history of language, and our
wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to
be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge,
such as have been opened to us since the birth
of modern science, this notion seems childlike
and pathetic. But it was eminently characteris-
tic of the eighteenth century."

It is small wonder therefore that this absurd
notion infected two of the most characteristic
figures of the eighteenth century— Johnson and
Franklin. Dr. Johnson set forth in the plan of his
dictionary that " one great end of this undertak-
ing is to fix the English language." Even so
shrewd a student of all things as was Franklin
seems to have accepted this current fallacy.
When he acknowledged the dedication of Noah
Webster's ' Dissertations on the English Lan-
guage,' he declared that he could not "but ap-
plaud your zeal for preserving the purity of our
language, both in its expressions and pronuncia-
tion." Then, as tho to prove to us, once for all,
the futility of all efforts to " fix the language "
and to "preserve its purity," Franklin picks out
half a dozen novelties of phrase and begs that
158

NEW WORDS AND OLD

Webster will use his " authority in reprobating
them." Among these innovations that Franklin
disapproved of are improved, noticed, advocated,
progressed, and opposed.

This letter to Webster was written in 1789; and
already in 1760 Franklin had yielded to certain of
David Hume's criticisms upon his parts of
speech: "I thank you for your friendly admoni-
tion relating to some unusual words in the pam-
phlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate
and the colonize, since they are not in common
use here, I give up as bad ; for certainly in writ-
ings intended for persuasion and for general in-
formation, one cannot be too clear; and every
expression in the least obscure is a fault. The
unshakable, too, tho clear, I give up as rather
low. The introducing new words, where we
are already possessed of old ones sufficiently
expressive, I confess must be generally wrong,
as it tends to change the language."

With all his intellect and all his insight and all
his common sense— and with this most precious
quality Franklin was better furnished than either
Johnson or Dryden— he could not foresee that to
notice and to advocate and to colonize were words
without which the English language could not do
its work in the world. And when he gives up
unshakable " as rather low " he stands confessed
as a contemporary of the men whom Fielding

'59

NEW WORDS AND OLD

and Goldsmith girded at. In spite of the exam-
ple of Steele and Addison, in spite of his own
vigorous directness in ' Poor Richard ' and in all
his political pamphlets, Franklin feels that there
is and that there ought to be a wide gap between
the English that is spoken and the English that is
written. He did not perceive that spoken Eng-
lish, with all its hazardous expressions, its
clipped words, its violent metaphors, its pictur-
esque slang, its slovenly clumsiness, is none the
less the proving-ground of the literary vocabu-
lary, which is forever tending to self-exhaustion.
Nobody has better stated the wiser attitude of
a writer toward the tools of his trade than Pro-
fessor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive dis-
cussion of ' What is Good English ? ' He begins
by noting that " the English language, as a whole,
is the richest of all modern tongues, and it is not
to be bounded by the comparatively narrow
limits of its literature. There exists, as well, the
easy, fluent usage of conversation, and there is
also the strong, simple, homely speech of the
common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking
of the soil, and having a sturdy power about it
that is unsurpassable for downright force and
blunt directness." And Professor Peck, having
pointed out how an artist in words is free to
avail himself of the term he needs from books or
from life, declares that " the writer of the best
160

NEW WORDS AND OLD

English is he whose language responds exactly to
his mood and thought, now thundering and
surging with the majestic words whose immedi-
ate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing
with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now
forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the
Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the
easy lightness of our modern phrase."
(1897-99)

161

VII

THE NATURALIZATION OF
FOREIGN WORDS

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN
WORDS

WHEN Taine was praising that earliest of an-
alytical novels, the ' Princess of Cleves,' he
noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette's
style. " Half of the words we use are unknown
to Madame de Lafayette," he declared. "She
is like the painters of old, who could make every
shade with only five or six colors." And he as-
serts that "there is no easier reading" than this
story of Madame de Lafayette's; "a child could
understand without effort all her expressions and
all her phrases. . . . Nowadays every writer is
a pedant, and every style is obscure. All of us
have read three or four centuries, and three or
four literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criti-
cism have weighted us with their discoveries
and their jargons."

This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the
strange phenomenons of the nineteenth century
was the sudden and enormous swelling of our
vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dic-
tionary is even more obvious in English than in
French, for there are now three times as many
165

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

human beings using the language of Shakspere
as there are now using the language of Moliere;
and while the speakers of French are compacted
in one country and take their tone from its cap-
ital, the speakers of English are scattered in the
four quarters of the earth, and they use each
man his own speech in his own fashion. From
the wider variety of interests among those who
speak English, our language is perforce more
hospitable to foreign words than French needs to
be, since it is used rather by a conservative peo-
ple who prefer to stay at home.

Perhaps the French are at times even too in-
hospitable to the foreign phrase. A friend of
mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bour-
get's 'Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,'
fresh from the perusal of the German philoso-
phers, told me that he was pained by M. Bour-
get's vain effort to express the thoughts the
French author had absorbed from the Germans.
It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for
speech, and could not say what was in his mind
for lack of words in his native tongue capable of
conveying his meaning. Of course it must be
remembered that German philosophy is vague
and fluctuating, and that the central thought is
often obscured by a penumbra, while French is
the most precise of languages. Those who are
proud of it have declared that what is not clear
166

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

is not French. When Hegel was asked by a
traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his
system of philosophy, he smiled and answered
that it could not be explained summarily —
"especially in French!"

The English language extends a warmer wel-
come to the foreign term, and also exercises more
freely its right to make a word for itself when-
ever one is needed. The manufactured article is
not always satisfactory, but if it gets into general
use, no further evidence is required that it was
made to supply a genuine want. Scientist, for
example, is an ugly word (altho an invention of
Whewell's), and yet it was needed. How neces-
sary it was can be seen by any reader of the late
F. W. H. Myers's essay on ' Science and a Future
Life,' who notes that Myers refused resolutely
to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning
the author wanted, and that the British writer
preferred to employ instead the French savant,
which does not — etymologically at least — con-
tain his full intention. Myers's fastidiousness
did not, however, prevent his using creation-
ist as an adjective, and also bonism as a substitute
for optimism, "with no greater barbarism in the
form of the word and more accuracy in the
meaning."

Just as Myers used savant so Ruskin was will-
ing to arrest the rhythm of a fine passage by the
167

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

obtrusion of two French words : " A well-edu-
cated gentleman may not know many languages ;
may not be able to speak any but his own ; may
have read very few books. But whatever lan-
guage he knows, he knows precisely; whatever
word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly ;
above all, he is learned in the peerage of words ;
knows the words of true descent and ancient
blood at a glance from words of modern ca-
naille ; remembers all their ancestry, their inter-
marriages, distantest relationships, and the ex-
tent to which they were admitted, and offices
they hold among the national noblesse of words,
at any time and in any country." There seems
to be little or no excuse for the employment here
of noblesse = nobility ; and as for canaille, per-
haps Ruskin held that to be a French word on
the way to become an English word — a natural-
ization not likely to take place without a marked
modification of the original pronunciation, which
is difficult for the English mouth.

Every one who loves good English cannot but
have a healthy hatred for the style of a writer
who insists on bespattering his pages with alien
words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more
tolerant, I think, toward a term taken from one of
the dead languages than toward one derived from
any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop
who liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sen-
168

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

tence was oversanguine in his explanation that
"everybody knows a little Hebrew." It is said
that even a Latin quotation is now no longer
certain to be recognized in the British House of
Commons; and yet it was a British statesman
who declared that, altho there was no necessity
for a gentleman to know Latin, he ought at least
to have forgotten it.

For a bishop to quote Hebrew is now pedantic,
no doubt, and even for the inferior clergy to
quote Latin. It is pedantic, but it is not indeco-
rous; whereas a French quotation in the pulpit,
or even the use of a single French word, like
savant, for example, would seem to most of us
almost a breach of the proprieties. It would
strike us, perhaps, not merely as a social solecism,
but somehow as morally reprehensible. A
preacher who habitually cited French phrases
would be in danger of the council. To picture
Jonathan Edwards as using the language of Vol-
taire is impossible. That a French quotation
should seem more incongruous in the course of
a religious argument than a Latin, a Greek, or a
Hebrew quotation, is perhaps to be ascribed to the
fact that many of us hold the Parisians to be a more
frivolous people than the Romans, the Athenians,
or the Israelites; and as the essay of Mr. Myers
was a religious argument, this may be one reason
why his employment of savant was unfortunate.
169

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

Another reason is suggested by Professor
Dowden's shrewd remark that "a word, like a
comet, has a tail as well as a head." An adroit
craftsman in letters is careful always that the
connotations of the terms he chooses shall be in
accord with the tone of his thesis. It may be
disputed whether savant denotes the same thing
as scientist, but it can hardly be denied that
the connotations of the two words are wholly
different. For my own part, some lingering
memory of Abbott's 'Napoleon,' absorbed in
boyhood, links the wise men of France with
the donkeys of Egypt, because whenever the
Mameluke cavalry threatened the French squares
the cry went up, "Asses and savants to the
center!"

After all, it is perhaps rather a question whether
or not savant is now an English noun. There
are many French words knocking at the door of
the English language and asking for admission.
Is littoral for shore now an English noun ? Is
blond an English adjective meaning light-hatred
and opposed to brunette ? Is brunette itself really
Anglicized ? (I ask this in spite of the fact that a
friend of mine once read in a country newspaper
a description of a brunette horse.) Has inedited
for unpublished won its way into our language
finally ? Lowell gave it his warrant, at least by
using it in his ' Letters ' ; but I confess that it has
170

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

always struck me as liable to confusion with
unedited.

Foreign words must always be allowed to
land on our coasts without a passport; yet if any
of them linger long enough to warrant a belief
that they may take out their papers sooner or
later, we must decide at last whether or not they
are likely to be desirable residents of our diction-
ary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we
may fairly enough insist on their renouncing their
foreign allegiance. They must cast in their lot
with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws
only. The French chaperon, for example, has
asked for admission to our vocabulary, and the
application has been granted, so that we have
now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller
was chaperoned by Becky Sharp at the last ball
given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we have
even changed the spelling of the noun to corre-
spond better with our Anglicized pronunciation,
thus chaperone. Thus technique has changed its
name to tecbnic, and is made welcome; so early
as 1867 Matthew Arnold used technic in his
' Study of Celtic Literature,' but even now his fel-
low-islanders are slow in following his example.
Thus employe is accepted in the properly Angli-
cized form of employee. Thus the useful cloture
undergoes a sea-change and becomes the English
closure. And why not cotery also ? I note that
171

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

in his 'Studies in Literature,' published in 1877,
Professor Dowden put technique into italics as
tho it was still a foreign word, while he left
coterie in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted
into English.

So toilette has been abbreviated to toilet ; at
least, I should have said so without any hesita-
tion if I had not recently seen the foreign spelling
reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert
Louis Stevenson's 'Amateur Emigrant' — and
this in the complete Edinburgh edition prepared
by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling
in the British prose of Stevenson is a surprise,
especially since the author of the ' Dynamiter' is
on record as a contemner of another orthographic
Gallicism. In a foot-note to ' More New Arabian
Nights ' Stevenson declares that "any writard
who writes dynamitard shall find in me a never-
resting fightard."

I should like to think that the naturalized litera-
tor was supplanting the alien litterateur, but I
cannot claim confidence as to the result. Litera-
tor is a good English word : I have found it in
the careful pages of Lockhart's ' Life of Scott ' ;
and I make no doubt that it can prove a much
older pedigree than that. It seems to me a bet-
ter word by far than literarian, which the late
Fitzedward Hall manufactured for his own use
"some time in the fifties," and which he de-
172

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

fended against a British critic who denounced
it as "atrocious." Hall, praising the word of
his own making, declared that "to liter atus or
/iterator, for literary person or a longer phrase
of equivalent import, there are obvious objec-
tions." Nobody, to the best of my belief, ever
attempted to use in English the Latin literatus,
altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by
his series of papers on the ' Literati of America.'
Since Poe's death the word has ceased to be cur-
rent, altho it was not uncommon in his day.

Perhaps one of the obvious objections to liter-
atus is that if it be treated as an English word the
plural it forms is not pleasant to the ear — liter a-
tuses. Here, indeed, is a moot point : How
does a foreign word make its plural in English ?
Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing, writing in
Harper's Ba^ar on the college education of
young women, spoke of foci. Mr. Churton
Collins, preparing a book about the study of
English literature in the British universities,
expressed his desire "to raise Greek, now gradu-
ally falling out of our curricula and degenerating
into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pe-
dants, to its proper place in education." Here
we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins treating
focus and curriculum as words not yet assimi-
lated by our language, and therefore required
to assume the Latin plural.
»73

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on
the part of these writers ? If focus and curricu-
lum are not good English words, what need is
there to employ them when you are using the
English language to convey your thoughts ?
There are occasions, of course, where the em-
ployment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they
must always be very rare. The imported word
which we really require we had best take to
ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treat-
ing it thereafter absolutely as an English word, and
giving it the regular English plural. If the word
we use is so foreign that we should print it in
italics, then of course the plural should be formed
according to the rules of the foreign language
from which it has been borrowed ; but if it has
become so acclimated in our tongue that we
should not think of underlining it, then surely it
is English enough to take an English plural. If
cherub is now English, its plural is the English
cherubs, and not the Hebrew cherubim. If cri-
terion is now English, its plural is the English
criterions, and not the Greek criteria, If formula
is now English, its plural is the English formulas,
and not the Latin formula. If bureau is now
English, its plural is the English bureaus, and
not the French bureaux.

What is the proper plural in English of cactus?
of vortex ? of antithesis ? of phenomenon ? In a

•74

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

volume on the 'Augustan Age,' in Professor
George Saintsbury's ' Periods of European Litera-
ture,'we find lexica — a masterpiece of petty
pedantry and of pedantic pettiness. As Landor
made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon
Hare, "There is an affectation of scholarship in
compilers of spelling-books, and in the authors
they follow for examples, when they bring for-
ward phenomena and the like. They might as
well bring forward mysteria. We have no right
to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their
grammars: we need no "vortices when we have
•vortexes before us ; and while we have memoran-
dums, factotums, and ultimatums, let our shep-
herd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as
have wandered from the flock."

Lander's own scholarship was too keen and
his taste was too fine for him not to abhor such af-
fectation. He held that Greek and Latin words
had no business in an English sentence unless
they had been frankly acclimated in the English
language, and that one of the conditions of this
acclimatizing was the shedding of their original
plurals. And that this is also the common-sense
view of most users of English is obvious enough.
Nobody now ventures to write factota or ulti-
mata ; and even memoranda seems to be vanish-
ing. But phenomena and data still survive; and
so do errata and candelabra. Whatever may

«75

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

be the fate of phenomena, that of the three other
words may perhaps be like unto the fate of opera
— which is also a Latin plural and which has
become an English singular. We speak unhesi-
tatingly of the operas of Rossini ; are we going,
in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the cande-
labras of Cellini ? In his vigorous article on the
orthography of the French language — which is
still almost as chaotic and illogical as the orthog-
raphy of the English language — Sainte-Beuve
noted as a singular peculiarity the fact that errata
had got itself recognized as a French singular,
but that it did not yet take the French plural;
thus we see un errata and des errata.

It is true also that when we take over a term
from another language we ought to be sure
that it really exists in the other language. For
lack of observance of this caution we find our-
selves now in possession of phrases like nom
de plume and deshabille, of which the French
never heard. And even when we have assured
ourselves of the existence of the word in the
foreign language, it behooves us then to as-
sure ourselves also of its exact meaning before we
take it for our own. In his interesting and in-
structive book about 'English Prose,' Professor
Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte-
Bowe is not yet an extinct species; and he adds
in a note that "the word lev^e seems to be another
176

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

genuine instance of the same insular dialect,"
since it is not French of any date, but'an English
improvement upon the verb (or substantive)
lever, "getting up in the morning."

An example even more extraordinary than any
of these, I think, will occur to those of us who
are in the habit of glancing through the theatrical
announcements of the American newspapers.
This is the taking of the French word vaudeville
to designate what was once known as a "variety
show " and what is now more often called a
"specialty entertainment." For any such inter-
pretation of -vaudeville there is no warrant what-
ever in French. Originally the "vaudeville"
was a satiric ballad, bristling with hits at the
times, and therefore closely akin to the "topical
song " of to-day ; and it is at this stage of its
evolution that Boileau asserted that

Le Franfais, ne malm, crea le vaudeville.

In time there came to be spoken words accom-
panying those sung, and thus the "vaudeville"
expanded slowly into a little comic play in which
there were one or more songs. Of late the
Parisian "vaudeville" has been not unlike the
London " musical farce." At no stage of its ca-
reer had the "vaudeville" anything to do with
the "variety show"; and yet to the average
American to-day the two words seem synony-
177

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

mous. There was even organized in New York,
in the fall of 1892, a series of subscription sup-
pers during which "specialty entertainments"
were to be given; and in spite of the fact that
the organizers were presumably persons who had
traveled, they called their society the "Vaude-
ville Club," altho no real "vaudeville" was ever
presented before the members during its brief
and inglorious career. Of course explanation
and protest are now equally futile. The mean-
ing of the word is forever warped beyond cor-
rection; and for the future here in America a
"vaudeville performance" is a "variety show,"
no matter what it may be or may have been in
France. When the people as a whole accept a
word as having a certain meaning, that is and
must be the meaning of the word thereafter;
and there is no use in kicking against the pricks.
The fate in English of another French term is
even now trembling in the balance. This is the
word nte. The French have found a way out of
the difficulty of indicating easily the maiden name
of a married woman ; they write unhesitatingly
about Madame Machin, nee Chose; and the Ger-
mans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a
hint from the French and the Germans, and thus
of speaking about Mrs. Brown, born Gray, as they
do, not a few English writers have simply bor-
rowed the actual French word, and so we read
178

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

about Mrs. Black, ne'e White. As usual, this bor-
rowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems
to be irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of
ne'e by using it in the sense of ' ' formerly. " Thus
in the 'Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88, 'col-
lected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell,
the editor supplies in foot-notes information about
the persons whose names appear in the corre-
spondence. In one of these annotations we read
that the wife of Sir Anthony de Rothschild was
" ne'e Louisa Montefiore" (i. 165), and in another
that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was " nte Annie
de Rothschild" (ii. 160). Now, neither of these
ladies was born with a given name as well as
a family name. It is obvious that the editor
has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning
of nee to suit his own convenience, a proceed-
ing of which I venture to think that Mat-
thew Arnold himself would certainly have dis-
approved. In fact, I doubt if Mr. Russell is not
here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious as
that charged against a wealthy western lady now
residing at the capital of the United States, who
is said to have written her name on the register of
a New York hotel thus: " Mrs. Blank, Washing-
ton, ne'e Chicago."

Why is it that the wandering stars of the the-
atrical firmament are wont to display themselves
in a rtpertoire when it would be so much easier
179

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

for them to make use of a repertory ? And why
does the teacher of young and ambitious singers
insist on calling his school a conservatoire when
it would assert its rank just as well if it was
known as a conservatory ? What strange freak
of chance has led so many of the women who
have made themselves masters of the technic of
the piano to announce themselves as pianistes in
the vain belief that pianiste is the feminine of
pianist? How comes it that a man capable of
composing so scholarly a book as the 'Greek
Drama ' of Mr. Lionel D. Barnett really is should
be guilty of saying that certain declamations in
the later theater " were adapted to the style of
popular artistes" ? And why does Mr. Andrew
Lang (in his ' Angling Sketches ') write about the
aspbalte, when the obvious English is either
aspbalt or asphaltum ?

And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this
dereliction, has no hesitation in objecting to a
" delightful grammatical form which closes a
scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The
author gets his characters off the stage with the
announcement: 'They exit.' He seems to think
that exit is a verb. I exit, he exits, they exit. It
would be interesting to learn how he translates
exeunt omnes. One is accustomed to ' a penetra-
lia' from young lions, and to 'a strata,' but
'they exit' is original."

180

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

But the verb to exit is not original with the
writer in the new rag-bag journal. It has been
current in England for three quarters of a century
at least, and it can be found in the pages of that
vigorously written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trol-
lope's 'Domestic Manners of the Americans'
(published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in
which she describes how the American women,
left alone, "all console themselves together for
whatever they may have suffered in keeping
awake by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake
and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake, waffle-cake
and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved
cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce,
and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in
any other country of the known world. After
this massive meal is over, they return to the
drawing-room, and it always appeared to me
that they remained together as long as they could
bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet,
shawl, and exit."

The verb to exit, with the full conjugation Mr.
Lang thought so strange, has long been common
among theatrical folk. The stage-manager will
tell the leading lady "You exit here, and she ex-
its up left." The theatrical folk, who probably
first brought the verb into use, did not borrow it
from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose ;
they simply made a verb of the existing English
181

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

noun exit, meaning a way out. We old New-
Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum's
Museum stood at the corner of Broadway and
Ann Street, remember also the signs which used
to declare

THIS WAY

TO THE

GRAND EXIT

and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of
the countryman who went wonderingly to dis-
cover what manner of strange beast the "exit"
might be, and who unexpectedly found himself
in the street outside.

The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due
to his happening not to recall the fact that exit
had become, first, an English noun, and, sec-
ond, an English verb. When once it was An-
glicized, it had all the rights of a native ; it was
a citizen of no mean country. The principle
which it is well to keep in mind in any con-
sideration of the position in English of terms
once foreign is that no word can serve two
masters. The English language is ever rav-
enous and voracious ; its appetite is insatiable.
It is forever taking over words from strange
tongues, dead and alive. These words are but
182

THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS

borrowed at first, and must needs conform to
all the grammatical peculiarities of their native
speech. But some of them are sooner or later
firmly incorporated into English ; and thereafter
they must cease to obey any laws but those of
the language into which they have been adopted.
Either a word is English or it is not ; and a de-
cision on this point is rarely difficult.
(1895-1900)

183

VIII
THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

IT is characteristic of the interest which science
is now taking in things formerly deemed
unworthy of consideration that philologists no
longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms.
Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the
amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who
affected to despise slang. To the trained inves-
tigator into the mutations of language and into
the transformations of the vocabulary, no word
is too humble for respectful consideration ; and it
is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable
lessons are learned. But until recently few men
of letters ever mentioned slang except in dispar-
agement and with a wish for its prompt extirpa-
tion. Even professed students of speech, like
Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn of their
former authority), are abundant in declarations
of abhorrent hostility. DeQuincey, priding him-
self on his independence and on his iconoclasm,
was almost alone in saying a good word for
slang.

187

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

There is this excuse for the earlier author who
treated slang with contumely, that the differen-
tiation of slang from cant was not complete in
his day. Cant is the dialect of a class, often
used correctly enough, as far as grammar is con-
cerned, but often also unintelligible to those who
do not belong to the class or who are not ac-
quainted with its usages. Slang was at first the
cant of thieves, and this seems to have been its
only meaning until well into the present century.
In 'Redgauntlet,' for example, published in 1824,
Scott speaks of the "thieves' Latin called slang."
Sometime during the middle of the century
slang seems to have lost this narrow limitation,
and to have come to signify a word or a phrase
used with a meaning not recognized in polite
letters, either because it had just been invented,
or because it had passed out of memory. While
cant, therefore, was a language within a language,
so to speak, and not to be understanded of the
people, slang was a collection of colloquialisms
gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike
the bend sinister of illegitimacy.

Certain of its words were unquestionably of
very vulgar origin, being survivals of the "thieves'
Latin " Scott wrote about. Among these are pal
and cove, words not yet admitted to the best
society. Others were merely arbitrary misap-
plications of words of good repute, such as the

188

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

employment of awfully and jolly as synonyms
for "very — as intensives, in short. Yet others
were violent metaphors, like in the soup, kicking
the bucket, holding up (a stage-coach). Others,
again, were the temporary phrases which spring
up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unac-
countably for a few months, and then disappear
forever, leaving no sign ; such as shoo-fly in
America and all serene in England.

An analysis of modern slang reveals the fact
that it is possible to divide the words and phrases
of which it is composed into four broad classes,
of quite different origin and of very varying value.
Toward two of these classes it may be allowable
to feel the contempt so often expressed for slang
as a whole. Toward the other two classes such a
feeling is wholly unjustifiable, for they are per-
forming an inestimable service to the language.

Of the two unworthy classes, the first is that
which includes the survivals of the "thieves'
Latin," the vulgar terms used by vulgar men to
describe vulgar things. This is the slang which
the police-court reporter knows and is fond of
using profusely. This is the slang which Dick-
ens introduced to literature. This class of slang
it is which is mainly responsible for the ill repute
of the word. Much of the dislike for slang felt
by people of delicate taste is, however, due to
the second class, which includes the ephemeral
189

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

phrases fortuitously popular for a season, and
then finally forgotten once for all. These mere
catchwords of the moment are rarely foul, as the
words and phrases of the first class often are, but
they are unfailingly foolish. There you go -with
your eye out, which was accepted as a humorous
remark in London, and Where did you get that
hat? which had a like fleeting vogue in New
York, are phrases as inoffensive as they are flat.
These temporary terms come and go, and are
forgotten swiftly. Probably most readers of
Forcythe Wilson's ' Old Sergeant ' need now to
have it explained to them that during the war a
grape-vine meant a lying rumor.

It must be said, however, that even In the
terms of the first class there is a striving upward,
a tendency to disinfect themselves, as any reader
of Grose's ' Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue '
must needs remark when he discovers that
phrases used now with perfect freedom had a
secret significance in the last century. There
are also innuendos not a few in certain of Shak-
spere's best-known plays which fortunately es-
cape the notice of all but the special student of
the Elizabethan vocabulary.

The other two classes of slang stand on a dif-
ferent footing. Altho they suffer from the stig-
ma attached to all slang by the two classes
already characterized, they serve a purpose. In-
190

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

deed, their utility is indisputable, and it was
never greater than it is to-day. One of these
classes consists of old and forgotten phrases or
words, which, having long lain dormant, are
now struggling again to the surface. The other
consists of new words and phrases, often vigor-
ous and expressive, but not yet set down in the
literary lexicon, and still on probation. In these
two classes we find a justification for the exist-
ence of slang — for it is the function of slang to be
a feeder of the vocabulary. Words get thread-
bare and dried up; they come to be like evapo-
rated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the
duty of slang to provide substitutes for the good
words and true which are worn out by hard
service. And many of the recruits slang has
enlisted are worthy of enrolment among the
regulars. When a blinded conservative is called
a mossback, who is so dull as not to perceive the
poetry of the word ? When an actor tells us
how the traveling company in which he was
engaged got stranded, who does not recognize
the force and the felicity of the expression ? And
when we hear a man declare that he would to-
day be rich if only his foresight had been equal
to his hindsight, who is not aware of the value
of the phrase ? No wonder is it that the verbal
artist hankers after such words which renew the
lexicon of youth! No wonder is it that the
191

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

writer who wishes to present his thought freshly
seeks these words with the bloom yet on them,
and neglects the elder words desiccated as tho
for preservation in a herbarium !

The student of slang is surprised that he is
able to bring forward an honorable pedigree for
many words so long since fallen from their high
estate that they are now treated as upstarts when
they dare to assert themselves. Words have
their fates as well as men and books; and the
ups and downs of a phrase are often almost as
pathetic as those of a man. It has been said that
the changes of fortune are so sudden here in
these United States that it is only three genera-
tions from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The
English language is not quite so fast as the Amer-
ican people, but in the English language it is
only three centuries from shirt sleeves to shirt
sleeves. What could seem more modern, more
western even, than deck for pack of cards, and to
lay out or to lay out cold for to knockdown? Yet
these are both good old expressions, in decay no
longer, but now insisting on their right to a re-
newed life. Deck is Elizabethan, and we find in
Shakspere's 'King Henry VI.' (part iii., act v.,
sc. i.) that

The king was slyly finger'd from the deck.

To lay out in its most modern sense is very early

English.

192

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

Even more important than this third class of
slang expressions is the fourth, containing the
terms which are, so to speak, serving their ap-
prenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or
not they will be admitted finally into the gild
of good English. These terms are either useful
or useless ; they either satisfy a need or they do
not; they therefore live or die according to the
popular appreciation of their value. If they ex-
pire, they pass into the limbo of dead-and-gone
slang, than which there is no blacker oblivion. If
they survive it is because they have been received
into the literary language, having appealed to the
perceptions of some master of the art and craft
of speech, under whose sponsorship they are ad-
mitted to full rights. Thus we see that slang is
a training-school for new expressions, only the
best scholars getting the diploma which confers
longevity, the others going surely to their fate.

Sometimes these new expressions are words
only, sometimes they are phrases. To go back
on, for instance, and to give one's self away are
specimens of the phrase characteristic of this
fourth and most interesting class of slang at its
best. In its creation of phrases like these, slang
is what idiom was before language stiffened into
literature, and so killed its earlier habit of idiom-
making. After literature has arrived, and after
the schoolmaster is abroad, and after the print-

'93

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

ing-press has been set up in every hamlet, the
idiom-making faculty of a language is atrophied
by disuse. Slang is sometimes, and to a certain
extent, a survival of this faculty, or at least a
substitute for its exercise. In other words (and
here I take the liberty of quoting from a private
letter of one of the foremost authorities on the
history of English, Professor Lounsbury), "slang
is an effort on the part of the users of language
to say something more vividly, strongly, con-
cisely than the language as existing permits it to
be said"; and he adds that slang is therefore
"the source from which the decaying energies
of speech are constantly refreshed."

Being contrary to the recognized standards of
speech, slang finds no mercy at the hands of
those who think it their duty to uphold the strict
letter of the law. Nothing amazes an investiga-
tor more, and nothing more amuses him, than
to discover that thousands of words now secure
in our speech were once denounced as interlo-
pers. "There is death in the dictionary," said
Lowell, in his memorable linguistic essay pre-
fixed to the second series of the ' Biglow Papers ' ;
"and where language is too strictly limited by
convention, the ground for expression to grow
in is limited also, and we get a potted literature
— Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees."
And in the paper on Dryden he declared that "a
'94

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

language grows and is not made." Pedants are
ever building the language about with rules of
iron in a vain effort to keep it from growing
naturally and according to its needs.

It is true that cab and mob are clipped words,
and there has always been a healthy dislike of any
clipping of the verbal currency. But consols
is firmly established. Two clipped words there
are which have no friends — gents and pants.
Dr. Holmes has put them in the pillory of a
couplet:

The things named pants, in certain documents,
A word not made for gentlemen, but gents.

And recently a sign, suspended outside a big
Broadway building, announced that there were
"Hands wanted on pants," the building being a
clothing factory, and not, as one might suppose,
a boys' school.

The slang of a metropolis, be that where you
will, in the United States or in Great Britain, in
France or in Germany, is nearly always stupid.
There is neither fancy nor fun in the Parisian's
Obe Lambert or on dirait du veau, nor in the
Londoner's all serene or there you go witb your
eye out — catchwords which are humorous, if
humorous they are, only by general consent and
for some esoteric reason. It is to such stupid
phrases of a fleeting popularity that Dr. Holmes
•95

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

refers, no doubt, when he declares that "the use
of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a substitute
for differentiated specific expressions is at once a
sign and a cause of mental atrophy." And this
use of slang is far more frequent in cities, where
people often talk without having anything to say,
than in the country, where speech flows slowly.
Perhaps the more highly civilized a population
is, the more it has parted with the power of pic-
torial phrase-making. It may be that a certain
lawlessness of life is the cause of a lawlessness of
language. Of all metropolitan slang that of the
outlaws is most vigorous. It was after Vidocq
had introduced thieves' slang into polite society
that Balzac, always a keen observer and always
alert to pick up unworn words, ventured to say,
perhaps to the astonishment of many, that
"there is no speech more energetic, more colored,
than that of these people. " Balzac was not aca-
demic in his vocabulary, and he owed not a little
of the sharpness of his descriptions to his hatred
of the cut-and-dried phrases of his fellow-novel-
ists. He would willingly have agreed with
Montaigne when the essayist declared that the
language he liked, written or spoken, was "a suc-
culent and nervous speech, short and compact,
not so much delicated and combed out as vehe-
ment and brusk, rather arbitrary than monoto-
nous, . . . not pedantic, but soldierly rather, as
196

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

Suetonius called Caesar's." And this brings us
exactly to Mr. Bret Harte's

Phrases such as camps may teach,
Saber-cuts of Saxon speech,

There is a more soldierly frankness, a greater
freedom, less restraint, less respect for law and
order, in the west than in the east; and this may
be a reason why American slang is superior to
British and to French. The catchwords of New
York may be as inept and as cheap as the catch-
words of London and of Paris, but New York is
not as important to the United States as London
is to Great Britain and as Paris is to France; it is
not as dominating, not as absorbing. So it is
that in America the feebler catchwords of the city
give way before the virile phrases of the west.
There is little to choose between the bow 's your
poor feet? of London and the well, I should smile
of New York, for neither phrase had any excuse
for existence, and neither had any hope of sur-
vival. The city phrase is often doubtful in mean-
ing and obscure in origin. In London, for ex-
ample, the four-wheel cab is called a growler.
Why ? In New York a can brought in filled with
beer at a bar-room is called a growler, and the
act of sending this can from the private house to
the public house and back is called working the
growler. Why ?

197

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

But when we find a western writer describing
the effects of tanglefoot whisky, the adjective
explains itself, and is justified at once. And we
discover immediately the daringly condensed
metaphor in the sign, "Don't monkey with the
"} the picturesqueness of the word
and its fitness for service are visible at
a glance. So we understand the phrase readily
and appreciate its force when we read the story
of 'Buck Fanshaw's Funeral,' and are told that
"he never went bach on his mother," or when
we hear the defender of ' Banty Tim ' declare that

" Ef one of you teches the boy
He '11 wrestle bis bash to-night in hell,
Or my name 's not Tilman Joy."

To wrestle one's hash is not an elegant expression,
one must admit, and it is not likely to be adopted
into the literary language ; but it is forcible at
least, and not stupid. To go back on, however,
bids fair to take its place in our speech as a
phrase at once useful and vigorous.

From the wide and wind-swept plains of the
west came bli^ard, and altho it has been
suggested that the word is a survival from some
local British dialect, the west still deserves the
credit of having rescued it from desuetude. From
the logging-camps of the northwest came boom,
an old word again, but with a new meaning
198

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

which the language promptly accepted. From
still farther west came the use of sand to indicate
staying power, backbone — what New England
knows as grit and old England as pluck (a far
less expressive word). From the southwest came
cine}), from the tightening of the girths of the
pack-mules, and so by extension indicating a
grasp of anything so firm that it cannot get away.
Just why a dead cinch should be the securest
of any, I confess I do not know. Dead is here
used as an intensive; and the study of intensives
is as yet in its infancy. In all parts of Great
Britain and the United States we find certain
words wrenched from their true meaning and
most arbitrarily employed to heighten the value
of other words. Thus we have a dead cinch, or
a dead sure thing, a dead shot, a dead level — and
for these last two terms we can discover perhaps a
reason. Lowell noted in New England a use of
tormented as a euphemism for damned, as " not
a tormented cent." Every American traveler in
England must have remarked with surprise the
British use of the Saxon synonym of sanguinary
as an intensive, the chief British rivals of bloody
in this respect being blooming and blasted. All
three are held to be shocking to polite ears, and
it was with bated breath that the editor of a Lon-
don newspaper wrote about the prospects of " a

b y war"; while, as another London editor

'99

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

declared recently, it is now impossible for a cock-
ney to read with proper sympathy Jeffrey's ap-
peal to Carlyle, after a visit to Craigenputtock, to
bring his " blooming Eve out of her blasted para-
dise." Of the other slang synonyms for very —
jolly, "he was Jolly ill," is British; awfully was
British first, and is now American also ; and daisy
is American. But any discussion of intensives is
a digression here, and I return as soon as may be
to the main road.

To freeze to anything or any person is a
down-east phrase, so Lowell records, but it has
a far-western strength; and so has to get solid
with, as when the advice is given that "if a man
is courting a girl it is best to get solid with her
father." What is this phrase, however, but the
French solidarite, which we have recently taken
over into English to indicate a communion of in-
terests and responsibilities ? The likeness of
French terms to American is no new thing;
Lowell told us that Horace Mann, in one of his
public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance of the French
phrase s'orienter, and called upon his young
friends to practise it, altho "there was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not
always been to find out what was about east, and
to shape his course accordingly." A few years
ago, in turning over 'Karikari,' a volume of M.
200

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

Ludovic Halevy's clever and charming sketches
of Parisian character, I met with a delightful
young lady who had pas pour deux Hards de
coquetterie ; and I wondered whether M. Halevy,
if he were an American, and one of the forty of
an American Academy, would venture the asser-
tion that his heroine was not coquettish for a
cent.

Closely akin to to freeze to and to be solid with is
jumped on. When severe reproof is administered
the culprit is said to be jumped on; and if the
reproof shall be unduly severe, the sufferer is said
then to be jumped on "with both feet. All three
of these phrases belong to a class from which
the literary language has enlisted many worthy
recruits in the past, and it would not surprise me
to see them answer to their names whenever a
new dictionary calls the roll of English words.
Will they find themselves shoulder to shoulder
with spook, a word of Dutch origin, now volun-
teering for English service both in New York
and in South Africa ? And by that time will
slump have been admitted to the ranks, and fad,
and crank, in the secondary meaning of a man of
somewhat unsettled mind ? Slump is an Ameri-
canism, crank is an Americanism of remote British
descent, and fad is a Briticism ; this last is perhaps
the most needed word of the three, and from it
we get a name for the faddist, the bore who

201

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

rides his hobby hard and without regard to the
hounds.

Just as in New York the "Upper Ten Thou-
sand " of N. P. Willis have shrunk to the " Four
Hundred " of Mr. Ward McAllister, so in London
the swells soon became the smart set, and after
a while developed into swagger people, as they
became more and more exclusive and felt the
need of new terms to express their new quality.
But in no department of speech is the consump-
tion of words more rapid than in that describing
the degrees of intoxication ; and the list of slang
synonyms for the drunkard, and for his condi-
tion, and for the act which brings it about, is as
long as Leporello's. Among these, to get loaded
and to carry a load are expressions obvious
enough ; and when we recall that jag is a pro-
vincialism meaning a light load, we see easily
that the man who has a jag on is in the earlier
stages of intoxication. This use of the word is,
I think, wholly American, and it has not crossed
the Atlantic as yet, or else a British writer could
never have blundered into a definition of Jag as
an umbrella, quoting in illustration a paragraph
from a St. Louis paper which said that "Mr.
Brown was seen on the street last Sunday in the
rain carrying a large fine jag." One may won-
der what this British writer would have made
out of the remark of the Chicago humorist, that a

202

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

certain man was not always drunk, even if he did
jump "from jag to jag like an alcoholic chamois."

Here, of course, we are fairly within the boun-
daries of slang — of the slang which is temporary
only, and which withers away swiftly. But is
swell slang now, and fad, and crank ? Is boom
slang, and is blt^ard ? And if it is difficult to
draw any line of division between mere slang on
the one side, and idiomatic words and phrases on
the other, it is doubly difficult to draw this line
between mere slang and the legitimate technicali-
ties of a calling or a craft. Is it slang to say of a
picture that the chief figure in it is out of drawing,
or that the painter has got his values wrong ?
And how could any historian explain the ins and
outs of New York politics who could not state
frankly that the machine made a slate, and that
the mugwumps broke it. Such a historian must
needs master the meaning of laying pipe for
a nomination, or pulling wires to secure it, of
taking the stump before election, and of log-rolling
after it; he must apprehend the exact relation of
the boss to his henchmen and his heelers; and he
must understand who the half-breeds were, and
the stalwarts, and how the swallowtails were
different from the short-hairs.

To call one man a boss and another a henchman
may have been slang once, but the words are
lawful now, because they are necessary. It is
203

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

only by these words that the exact relation of a
certain kind of political leader to a certain kind
of political follower can be expressed succinctly.
There are, of course, not a few political phrases
still under the ban because they are needless.
Some of these may some day come to convey an
exact shade of meaning not expressed by any
other word, and when this shall happen, they
will take their places in the legitimate vocabulary.
I doubt whether this good fortune will ever befall
a use of influence, now not uncommon in Wash-
ington. The statesman at whose suggestion and
request an office-holder has received his appoint-
ment is known as that office-holder's influence.
Thus a poor widow, suddenly turned out of a
post she had held for years, because it was
wanted by the henchman of some boss whose
good will a senator or a department chief wished
to retain, explained to a friend that her dismissal
was due to the fact that her influence had died
during the summer. The inevitable extension of
the merit system in the civil service of our coun-
try will probably prevent the permanent accept-
ance of this new meaning.

The political is only one of a vast number of
technical vocabularies, all of which are proffering
their words for popular consumption. Every art
and every science, every trade and every calling,
every sect and every sport, has its own special
204

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

lexicon, the most of the words in which must
always remain outside of the general speech
of the whole people. They are reserves, to be
drawn upon to fill up the regular army in time
of need. Legitimate enough when confined to
their proper use, those technicalities become
slang when employed out of season, and when
applied out of the special department of human
endeavor in which they have been evolved. Of
course, if the public interest in this department
is increased for any reason, more and more words
from that technical vocabulary are adopted into
the wider dictionary of popular speech; and thus
the general language is still enriching itself by
the taking over of words and phrases from the
terminology devised by experts for their own
use. Not without interest would it be if we
could ascertain exactly how much of the special
vocabulary of the mere man of letters is now
understandable by the plain people. It is one of
the characters in ' Middlemarch ' who maintains
that "correct English" is only "the slang of
prigs who write history and essays, and the
strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

Of recent years many of the locutions of the
Stock Exchange have won their way into general
knowledge; and there are few of us who do not
know what bears and bulls are, what a corner is,
and what is a margin. The practical application
205

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

of scientific knowledge makes the public at large
familiar with many principles hitherto the exclu-
sive possession of the experts, and the public at
large gets to use freely to-day technicalities which
even the learned of yesterday would not have
understood. Current, for example, and insula-
tion, made familiar by the startlingly rapid exten-
sion of electrical possibilities in the last few years,
have been so fully assimilated that they are now
used independently and without avowed refer-
ence to their original electrical meanings.

The prevalence of a sport or of a game brings
into general use the terms of that special amuse-
ment. The Elizabethan dramatists, for example,
use vy and revy and the other technicalities of the
game of primero as freely as our western humorists
use going it blind and calling and the other tech-
nicalities of the game of poker, which has been
evolved out of primero in the course of the cen-
turies. Some of the technicalities of euchre
also, and of whist, have passed into every-day
speech; and so have many of the terms of base-
ball and of football, of racing and of trotting,
of rowing and of yachting. These made their
way into the vocabulary of the average man one
by one, as the seasons went around and as the
sports followed one another in popularity. So
during the civil war many military phrases were
frequent in the mouths of the people; and some
206

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

of these established themselves firmly in the
vocabulary.

"In language, as in life, "so Professor Dowden
tells us, "there is, so to speak, an aristocracy
and a commonalty : words with a heritage of dig-
nity, words which have been ennobled, and a
rabble of words which are excluded from posi-
tions of honor and trust." Some writers and
speakers there are with so delicate a sense of
refinement that they are at ease only with the
ennobled words, with the words that came
over with the conquerer, with the lords, spir-
itual and temporal, of the vocabulary. Others
there are, parvenus themselves, and so tainted
with snobbery that they are happy only in the
society of their betters; and these express the
utmost contempt for the mass of the vulgar.
Yet again others there are who have Lincoln's
liking for the plain words of the plain people
— the democrats of the dictionary, homely,
simple, direct. These last are tolerant of the
words, once of high estate, which have lost their
rank and are fallen upon evil days, preferring
them over the other words, plebeian once, but
having pushed their fortunes energetically in
successive generations, until now there are none
more highly placed.

Perhaps the aristocratic figure of speech is
a little misleading, because in the English lan-
207

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

guage, as in France after the Revolution, we find
la carriere owverte aux talents, and every word
has a fair chance to attain the highest dignity in
the gift of the dictionary. No doubt family con-
nections are still potent, and it is much easier for
some words to rise in life than it is for others.
Most people would hold that war and law and
medicine made a more honorable pedigree for a
technical term than the stage, for example, or than
some sport.

And yet the stage has its own enormous vocab-
ulary, used with the utmost scientific precision.
The theater is a hotbed of temporary slang, often
as lawless, as vigorous, and as picturesque as the
phrases of the west; but it has also a terminology
of its own, containing some hundreds of words,
used always with absolute exactness. A mascot,
meaning one who brings good luck, and a hoo-
doo, meaning one who brings ill fortune, are terms
invented in the theater, it is true; and many an-
other odd word can be credited to the same
source. But every one behind the scenes knows
also what sky-borders are, and bunch-lights,
and vampire-traps, and raking-pieces — technical
terms all of them, and all used with rigorous ex-
actitude. Like the technicalities of any other
profession, those of the stage are often very puz-
zling to the uninitiated, and a greenhorn could
hardly even make a guess at the meaning of
208

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

terms which every visitor to a green-room might
use at any moment. What layman could explain
the office of a. cut-drop, the utility of a carpenter's
scene, or the precise privileges of a bill-board
ticket ?

There is one word which the larger vocabulary
of the public has lately taken from the smaller
vocabulary of the playhouse, and which some
strolling player of the past apparently borrowed
from some other vagabond familiar with thieves'
slang. This word is fake. It has always con-
veyed the suggestion of an intent to deceive.
" Are you going to get up new scenery for the
new play?" might be asked; and the answer
would be, "No; we shall fake it," meaning
thereby that old scenery would be retouched and
readjusted so as to have the appearance of new.
From the stage the word passed to the news-
papers, and a fake is a story invented, not
founded on fact, "made out of whole cloth,"
as the stump-speakers say. Mr. Howells, always
bold in using new words, accepts fake as good
enough for him, and prints it in the ' Quality of
Mercy ' without the stigma of italics or quotation-
marks; just as in the same story he has adopted
the colloquial electrics for electric lights— i.e.,
" He turned off the electrics."

And hereafter the rest of us may use either fake
or electrics with a clear conscience, either hiding
209

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

ourselves behind Mr. Howells, who can always
give a good account of himself when attacked,
or else coming out into the open and asserting
our own right to adopt either word because it
is useful. "Is it called for ? Is it accordant with
the analysis of the language? Is it offered or
backed by good authority ? These are the con-
siderations by which general consent is won or
repelled," so Professor Whitney tells us, "and
general consent decides every case without ap-
peal." It happens that Don Quixote preceded
Professor Whitney in this exposition of the law,
for when he was instructing Sancho Panza, then
about to be appointed governor of an island, he
used a Latinized form of a certain word which
had become vulgar, explaining that "if some do
not understand these terms it matters little, for
custom will bring them into use in the course of
time so that they will be readily understood.
That is the way a language is enriched; custom
and the public are all-powerful there." Some-
times the needful word which is thought to be
too common for use is Latinized, as Don Quixote
preferred, but more often it is ennobled without
change, being simply lifted out from among its
former low companions.

One of the hardest lessons for the amateurs in
linguistics to learn — and most of them never
attain to this wisdom — is that affectations are

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

fleeting, that vulgarisms die of their own weak-
ness, and that corruptions do little harm to the
language. And the reason is not far to seek:
either the apparent affectation, the alleged vul-
garism, the so-called corruption, is accidental
and useless, in which case its vogue will be
brief and it will sink swiftly into oblivion; or
else it represents a need and fills a want, in which
case, no matter how careless it may be or how
inaccurately formed, it will hold its own firmly,
and there is really nothing more to be said about
it. In other words, slang and all other variations
from the high standard of the literary language
are either temporary or permanent. If they are
temporary only, the damage they can do is in-
considerable. If they are permanent, their sur-
vival is due solely to the fact that they were
convenient or necessary. When a word or a
phrase has come to stay (as reliable has, appa-
rently), it is idle to denounce a decision rendered
by the court of last resort. The most that we
can do with advantage is to refrain from using the
word ourselves, if we so prefer.

It is possible to go further, even, and to turn
the tables on those who see in slang an ever-
growing evil. Not only is there little danger to
the language to be feared from those alleged cor-
ruptions, and from these doubtful locutions of
evanescent popularity, but real harm is done by

211

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

the purists themselves, who do not understand
every modification of our language, and who
seek to check the development of idiom and to
limit the liberty which enables our speech freely
to provide for its own needs as these are revealed
by time. It is these half-educated censors,
prompt to protest against whatever is novel to
them, and swift to set up the standard of a nar-
row personal experience, who try to curb the
development of a language. It cannot be de-
clared too often and too emphatically how fortu-
nate it is that the care of our language and the
control of its development is not in the hands
even of the most competent scholars. In lan-
guage, as in politics, the people at large are in
the long run better judges of their own needs
than any specialist can be. As Professor Whitney
says, "the language would soon be shorn of no
small part of its strength if placed exclusively in
the hands of any individual or of any class." In
the hands of no class would it be enfeebled sooner
than if it were given to the guardianship of the
pedants and the pedagogs.

A sloven in speech is as offensive as a sloven
in manners or in dress; and neatness of phrase
is as pleasant to the ear as neatness of attire to
the eye. A man should choose his words at
least as carefully as he chooses his clothes; a
hint of the dandy even is unobjectionable, if it

212

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

is but a hint. But when a man gives his whole
mind to his dress, it is generally because he has
but little mind to give; and so when a man spends
his force wholly in rejecting words and phrases,
it is generally because he lacks ideas to express
with the words and phrases of which he does
approve. In most cases a man can say best
what he has to say without lapsing into slang;
but then a slangy expression which actually tells
us something is better than the immaculate sen-
tence empty of everything but the consciousness
of its own propriety.
(•893)

213

IX
QUESTIONS OF USAGE

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

IF any proof were needed of the fact that an
immense number of people take an intense
interest in the right and wrong use of the English
language, and also of the further fact that their
interest is out of all proportion to their knowledge
of the history of our speech, such proof could be
found in the swift and unceasing eruption of
"Jetters to the editor" which broke out in many
of the American newspapers immediately after
the publication of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's ' Reces-
sional.' The exciting cause of this rash exhibi-
tion was found in the line which told us that

The shouting and the tumult dies.

The gross blunder in this sentence leaped to the
eyes of many whose acquaintance with the prin-
ciples of English construction was confined to
what they chanced to remember of the rules
learned by heart in their grammar-school days.
But there were others whose reading was a little
wider, and who were able to cite precedents in
217

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

Mr. Kipling's favor from Milton and from Shak-
spere and from the King James translation of the
Bible. Yet the argument from the past failed to
convince some of the original protestants, one of
whom suggested that the erring poet should be
sent to a night-school, while another objected to
any further discussion of the subject, since "a
person who does n't know that the plural form
of the verb is used when the subject of said verb
is two or more nouns in the singular number
should receive no mention in a reputable news-
paper." It may be doubted whether the alter-
cation was really bloody enough to demand
attention from the disreputable newspapers,
altho it was fierce and intolerant while it
lasted.

The battle raged for a fortnight, and the foun-
dations of the deep were broken up. Yet it was
really a tempest in a teapot, and oil for the
troubled waters was ready at hand had any of
those in danger of shipwreck thought to make
use of it. In Professor Lounsbury's ' History of
the English Language'— a book from which it is
a constant pleasure to quote, since it combines
sound scholarship, literary skill, and common
sense in an uncommon degree— we are told that
" rules have been and still are laid down . . .
which never had any existence outside of the
minds of grammarians and verbal critics. By
. 218

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

these rules, so far as they are observed, freedom
of expression is cramped, idiomatic peculiarity
destroyed, and false tests for correctness set up,
which give the ignorant opportunity to point out
supposed error in others, while the real error lies
in their own imperfect acquaintance with the best
usage."

And then Professor Lounsbury cites in illustra-
tion the rule which was brought up against Mr.
Kipling: "There is a rule of Latin syntax that
two or more substantives joined by a copulative
require the verb to be in the plural. This has
been foisted into the grammar of English, of
which it is no more true than it is of modern
German. . . . The grammar of English, as ex-
hibited in the utterances of its best writers and
speakers, has from the very earliest period al-
lowed the widest discretion as to the use either
of the singular or the plural in such cases. The
importation and imposition of rules foreign to its
idiom, like the one just mentioned, does more to
hinder the free development of the tongue, and
to dwarf its freedom of expression, than the
widest prevalence of slovenliness of speech, or
of affectation of style ; for these latter are always
temporary in their character, and are sure to be
left behind by the advance in popular cultivation,
or forgotten through the change in popular taste."

This is really a declaration of independence for
219

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

writers of English. It is the frank assertion that
a language is made by those who use it— made
by that very use. Language is not an invention
of the grammarians and of the word-critics,
whose business, indeed, is not to make language
or to prescribe rules, but more modestly to record
usage and to discover the principles which may
underlie the incessant development of our com-
mon speech. And here in discussing the syntax
Professor Lounsbury is at one with Mr. George
Meredith discussing the vocabulary of our lan-
guage, when the British novelist notes his own
liking for " our blunt and racy vernacular, which
a society nourished upon Norman English and
English Latin banishes from print, largely to its
impoverishment, some think."

Those who have tried to impose a Latin syntax
on the English language are as arbitrary as those
who have insisted on an English pronunciation
of the Latin language. Their attitude is as illogi-
cal as it is dogmatic; and nowhere is dogmatism
less welcome than in the attempt to come to a just
conclusion in regard to English usage; and no-
where is the personal equation more carefully to be
allowed for. A term is not necessarily acceptable
because we ourselves are accustomed to it, nor is
it necessarily to be rejected because it reaches us
as a novelty. The Americanism which a Brit-
ish journalist glibly denounces may be but the

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

ephemeral catchword of a single street-gang, or
it may have come over in the 'Mayflower' and
be able to trace its ancestry back to a forefather
that crossed with William the Conqueror. The
Briticism which strikes some of us as uncouth
and vulgar may be but a chance bit of cockney
slang, or it may be warranted by the very genius
of our language.

Most of the little manuals which pretend to
regulate our use of our own language and to
declare what is and what is not good English are
grotesque in their ignorance; and the best of them
are of small value, because they are prepared on
the assumption that the English language is dead,
like the Latin, and that, like Latin again, its usage
is fixed finally. Of course this assumption is as
far as possible from the fact. The English lan-
guage is alive now— very much alive. And be-
cause it is alive it is in a constant state of growth.
It is developing daily according to its needs. It
is casting aside words and usages that are no
longer satisfactory; it is adding new terms as
new things are brought forward ; and it is making
new usages, as convenience suggests, short-cuts
across lots, and to the neglect of the five-barred
gates rigidly set up by our ancestors. It is throw-
ing away as worn out words which were once
very fashionable; and it is giving up grammatical
forms which seem to be no longer useful. It is

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

continually trying to keep itself in the highest
state of efficiency for work it has to do. It is
ever urging ahead in the direction of increased
utility; and if any of the so-called "rules" hap-
pens to stand in the path of its progress— so
much the worse for the rule! As Stephenson
said, " It will be bad for the coo!"

The English language is the tool of the peoples
who speak English and who have made it to fit
their hands. They have fashioned it to suit their
own needs, and it is quite as characteristic as any-
thing else these same peoples have made— quite
as characteristic as the common law and as par-
liamentary government. A language cannot but
be a most important witness when we wish to
inquire into the special peculiarities of a race.
The French, for instance, are dominated by the
social instinct, and they are prone to rely on logic
a little too much, and their language is therefore
a marvel of transparency and precision. In like
manner we might deduce from an analysis of
the German language an opinion as to the slow-
ness of the individual Teuton, as to his occasional
cloudiness, as to his willingness to take trouble,
and as to his ultimate thoroughness.

The peoples who speak English are very prac-
tical and very direct; they are impatient of need-
less detail; and they are intolerant of mere theory.
These are some of the reasons why English is

222

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

less embarrassed with niceties of inflection than
other languages, why it has cut its syntax to the
bone, why it has got rid of most of its declen-
sions and conjugations— why, in short, it has
almost justified the critic who called it a gram-
marless tongue. In every language there is a
constant tendency toward uniformity and an un-
ceasing effort to get rid of abnormal exceptions
to the general rule; but in no language are these
endeavors more effective than in English. In the
past they have succeeded in simplifying the rules
of our speech; and they are at work now in the
present on the same task of making English a
more efficient instrument for those who use it.

This effort of the language to do its duty as
best it can is partly conscious and partly uncon-
scious; and where the word-critic can be of
service is in watching for the result of the un-
conscious endeavor, so that it can be made plain,
and so that it can be aided thereafter by conscious
endeavor. The tendency toward uniformity is
irresistible; and one of its results just now to be
observed is an impending disappearance of the
subjunctive mood. Those who may have sup-
posed that the subjunctive was as firmly estab-
lished in English as the indicative can discover
easily enough by paying a little attention to their
own daily speech and to the speech of their edu-
cated neighbors that "if I be not too late," for
223

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

instance, is a form now rarely heard even in cul-
tivated society.

And the same tendency is to be observed also
in the written language. Letters in the London
Author in June and July, 1897, showed that in a
few less than a million words chosen from the
works of recent authors of good repute there
were only 284 instances of the subjunctive mood,
and that of these all but fifteen were in the verb
" to be. " This reveals to us that the value of this
variation of form is no longer evident, not merely
to careless speakers, but even to careful writers;
and it makes it probable that it is only a question
of time how soon the subjunctive shall be no
longer differentiated from the indicative. Where
our grandfathers would have taken pains to say
"if I were to go away," and "if I be not misin-
formed," our grandchildren will unhesitatingly
write, "if I was to go away," and "if I am not
misinformed." And so posterity will not need
to clog its memory with any rule for the employ-
ment of the subjunctive; and the English lan-
guage will have cleansed itself of a barnacle.

It is this same irresistible desire for the simplest
form and for the shortest which is responsible for
the increasing tendency to say " he don't " and
" she don't," on the analogy of " we don't," " you
don't," and "they don't," instead of the more
obviously grammatical "he does n't" and "she
224

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

does n't." A brave attempt has been made to
maintain that " he don't" is older than " he does
n't," and that it has at least the sanction of anti-
quity. However this maybe, "hedon't" iscertain
to sustain itself in the future because it calls for less
effort and because any willingness to satisfy the
purist will seem less and less worth while as time
goes on. It is well that the purist should fight
for his own hand; but it is well also to know
that he is fighting a losing battle.

The purist used to insist that we should not
say "the house is being built," but rather "the
house is building." So far as one can judge from
a survey of recent writing the purist has aban-
doned this combat; and nobody nowadays hesi-
tates to ask, " What is being done ?" The purist
still objects to what he calls the Retained Object
in such a sentence as " he was given a new suit
of clothes." Here again the struggle is vain, for
this usage is very old; it is well established in
English; and whatever may be urged against it
theoretically, it has the final advantage of con-
venience. The purist also tells us that we should
say "come to see me" and "try to do it," and
not "come and see me" and "try and do it."
Here once more the purist is setting up a per-
sonal standard without any warrant. He may
use whichever of these forms he likes best, and
we on our part have the same permission, with
225

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

a strong preference for the older and more idio-
matic of them.

Theory is all very well, but to be of any value
it must be founded on the solid rock of fact; and
even when it is so established it has to yield to
convenience. This is what the purist cannot be
induced to understand. He seems to think that
the language was made once for all, and that any
deviation from the theory acted on in the past is
intolerable in the present. He is often wholly at
sea in regard to his theories and to his facts-
more often than not ; but no doubt as to his own
infallibility ever discourages him. He just knows
that he is right and that everybody else is wrong;
and he has no sense of humor to save him from
himself. And he makes up in violence what he
lacks in wisdom. He accepts himself as a pro-
phet verbally inspired, and he holds that this
gives him the right to call down fire from heaven
on all who do not accept his message.

It was a purist of this sort who once wrote to
a little literary weekly in New York, protesting
against the use of people when persons would
seem to be the better word, and complacently
declaring that " for twenty-five years or more I
have kept my eye on this little word people and
I have yet to find a single American or English
author who does not misuse it." We are in-
stantly reminded of the Irish juryman who said,
226

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

" Eleven more obstinate men I never met in the
whole course of my life." In this pitiful condi-
tion of affairs one cannot discover on what this
purist bases the hope he expresses that "in the
course of two or three hundred years the correct
employment of it may possibly become general."
Rather may it be hoped that in the course of two
or three hundred years a knowledge of the prin-
ciples which govern English usage may become
general.

What is called the Split Infinitive is also a cause
of pain to the purist, who is greatly grieved when
he finds George Lewes in the ' Life of Goethe '
saying " to completely understand. " This insert-
ing of an adverb between the to and the rest
of the verb strikes the word-critic as pernicious,
and he denounces it instantly as a novelty to be
stamped out before it permanently contaminates
our speech. Even Professor A. S. Hill, in his
'Foundations of Rhetoric,' while admitting its
antiquity, since it has been in use constantly
from the days of Wyclif to the days of Herbert
Spencer, still declares it to be " a common fault "
not sanctioned or even condoned by good
authority.

The fact is, I think, that the Split Infinitive has

a most respectable pedigree, and that it is rather

the protest against it which is the novelty now

establishing itself. The Split Infinitive is to be

227

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

found in the pages of Shakspere, Massinger, Sir
Thomas Browne, Defoe, Burke, Coleridge, Byron,
De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Brown-
ing, Motley, Lowell, and Holmes. But it is a fact
also, I think, that since the protest has been raised
there has been a tendency among careful writers
to eschew the Split Infinitive, or at least to em-
ploy it only when there is a gain in lucidity from
its use, as there is, for example, in Professor
Lounsbury's " to more than counterbalance "
('Studies in Chaucer,' i. 447).

A writer who has worked out for himself a
theory of style, and who has made up his mind
as to the principles he ought to follow in writing,
often yields to protests the validity of which he
refuses to admit. He gives the protestant the
benefit of the doubt and drops the stigmatized
words from his vocabulary and refrains from the
stigmatized usages, reserving always the right to
avail himself of them at a pinch. What such a
writer has for his supreme object is to convey his
thought into the minds of his readers with the
least friction; and he tries therefore to avoid all
awkwardness of phrase, all incongruous words,
all locutions likely to arouse resistance, since any
one of these things will inevitably lessen the
amount of attention which this reader or that will
then have available for the reception of the writer's
message. This is what Herbert Spencer has called
228

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

the principle of Economy of Attention ; and a firm
grasp of this principle is a condition precedent to
a clear understanding of literary art.

For a good and sufficient reason such a writer
stands ready at any time to break this self-im-
posed rule. If a solecism, or a vulgarism even,
will serve his purpose better at a given moment
than the more elegant word, he avails himself of
it, knowing what he is doing, and risking the
smaller loss for the greater gain. M. Legouve
tells us that at a rehearsal of a play of Scribe's
he drew the author's attention to a bit of bad
French at the climax of one of the acts, and
Scribe gratefully accepted the correct form which
was suggested. But two or three rehearsals later
Scribe went back unhesitatingly to the earlier and
incorrect phrase, which happened to be swifter,
more direct, and dramatically more expressive
than the academically accurate sentence M. Le-
gouve had supplied. Shakspere seems often to
have been moved by like motives, and to have
been willing at any time to sacrifice strict gram-
mar to stage-effectiveness.

Two tendencies exist side by side to-day, and
are working together for the improvement of our
language. One is the tendency to disregard all
useless distinctions and to abolish all useless ex-
ceptions and to achieve simplicity and regularity.
The other is the tendency toward a more delicate
229

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

precision which shall help the writer to present
his thought with the utmost clearness.

Of the first of these abundant examples can be
cited phrases which the word-critic would de-
nounce, and which are not easy to defend on any
narrow ground, but which are employed freely
even by conscientious writers, well aware that no
utility is served by a pedantic precision. So we
find Matthew Arnold in his lectures ' On Trans-
lating Homer ' speaking of " the four first," where
the purist would prefer to have said "theirs/
four." So we find Hawthorne in the ' Blithedale
Romance' writing "fellow, clown, or bumpkin,
to either of these," when the purist would have
wished him to say " to any one of these," holding
that " either" can be applied only when there are
but two objects.

In like manner the word-critics object to the
use of the superlative degree when the compara-
tive is all that is needed; yet we find in the King
James translation of Genesis, "her eldest son,
Esau," and she had but two sons. And they
refuse to allow either a comparative or a superla-
tive to adjectives which indicate completeness;
yet we find in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' "its
success was not more universal." They do not
like to see a writer say that anything is " more
perfect" or " most complete," holding that what
is universal or perfect or complete "does not
230

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

admit of augmentation," as one of them declared
more than a century ago in the Gentleman's Mag-
a^ine for July, 1797. In all these cases logic may
be on the side of the word-critic. But what of
it ? Obedience to logic would here serve no use-
ful purpose, and therefore logic is boldly dis-
obeyed. However inexact these phrases may be,
they mislead no one and they can be understood
without hesitation.

Side by side with this tendency to take the
short-cut exists the other tendency to go the long
way round if by so doing the writer's purpose is
more easily accomplished. There is a common
usage which is frequently objurgated by the
word-critics and which may fall into desuetude,
not through their attacks, but because of its con-
flict with this second tendency. This is the in-
sertion of an unnecessary who or which after an
and or a but, as in this sentence from Professor
Butcher's admirable discussion of Aristotle's
' Theory of Poetry ' : " Nature is an artist capable
indeed of mistakes, but who by slow advances
and through many failures realizes her own
idea." So in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' we
are told of "a chorus of twenty-seven youths
and as many virgins, of noble family, and whose
parents were both alive." This locution is pro-
per in French, but it is denounced as improper
in English by the purists, who would strike out
231

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

the but from Professor Butcher's and the and
from Gibbon's.

It is a constant source of amusement to those
interested in observing the condition and the
development of the language to note the fre-
quency with which the phrases put under taboo
by the word-critics occur in the writings of the
masters of English. In my own recent reading I
have found this despised construction in the pages
of Fielding, Johnson, Thackeray, Matthew Ar-
nold, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. John Morley,
Mr. Henry James, and Professor Jebb in Great
Britain, and in pages of Hawthorne, Lowell,
Holmes, and Mr. John Fiske in the United States.
What is more significant perhaps is its discovery
in the works of professed students of language
—Trench, Isaac Taylor, Max Muller, and W. D.
Whitney.

And yet, in spite of this array of authorities, I
am inclined to believe that this usage may per-
haps disappear with the increasing attention
which the best writers are now giving to the
rhythm and balance of their sentences. It is not
that the form is wrong— that is a matter not to
be decided offhand ; it is that the form is awk-
ward and that it jars on the feeling for symmetry
—the feeling which leads us to put a candlestick
on each side of the clock on the mantelpiece.
Professor Whitney began one of his sentences
232

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

thus: "Castren, himself a Finn, and whose long
and devoted labors have taught us more respect-
ing them than has been brought to light by any
other man, ventures," etc. Would not this sen-
tence have been easier and more elegant if Whit-
ney had either struck out and (which is not
needed at all) or else inserted who was after
Castren ? In the sentence as Whitney wrote it
and whose makes me look back for the who which
my feeling for symmetry leads me to suppose
must have preceded it somewhere, and in this
vain search part of my attention is abstracted. I
have been forced to think of the manner of his
remarks when my mind ought to have given itself
so far as might be to the matter of them. In
other words, the real objection to this usage is
that it is in violation of the principle of Economy
of Attention.

Another usage also under fire from the purists
is exemplified in another extract from Whitney:
" It is, I am convinced, a mistake to commence
at once upon a course of detailed comparative
philology with pupils who have only enjoyed the
ordinary training in the classical or modern lan-
guages. " Obviously his meaning would be more
sharply defined if he had put only after instead of
before enjoyed. So Froude, writing about ' Eng-
lish Seamen in the Sixteenth Century,' says that
" the fore-and-aft rig alone would enable a vessel

233

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

to tack, as it is called, and this could only be used
with craft of moderate tonnage " ; and here again
a transposition after the verb would increase the
exactness of the statement.

The proposition of only is really important only
when the misplacing of it may cause ambiguity;
and Professor F. N. Scott has shown how Web-
ster, always careful in the niceties of style, un-
hesitatingly put only out of its proper place, if by
so doing he could improve the rhythm of his
period, as in this sentence from the second
Bunker Hill oration: "It did not, indeed, put an
end to the war; but, in the then existing hostile
state of feeling, the difficulties could only be re-
ferred to the arbitration of the sword." This is
as it should be, the small effect promptly sacri-
ficed for the larger. The rule— if rule it really is
—must be broken unhesitatingly when there is
greater gain than loss.

There is an anecdote in some volume of French
theatrical memoirs narrating an experience of
Mademoiselle Clairon, the great tragic actress,
with a pupil of hers, a girl of fine natural gifts
for the histrionic art, but far too frequent and
too exuberant in her gesticulation. So when the
pupil was once to appear before the public in a
recitation, Mademoiselle Clairon bound the girl's
arms to her side by a stiff thread and sent her
thus upon the stage. With the first strong feel-
234

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

ing she had to express the pupil tried to raise her
arms, only to be restrained by the thread. A
dozen times in the course of her recitation she
was prevented from making the gestures she de-
sired, until at the very end she could stand it no
longer, and in the climax of her emotion she
broke her bonds and lifted her hands to her head.
When she came off the stage she went humbly
to where Mademoiselle Clairon was standing in
the wings and apologized for having snapped the
thread. "But you did quite right!" said the
teacher. " That was the time to make the ges-
ture—not before!"

Rules exist to aid in composition; and by wise
men composition is not undertaken merely to
prove the existence of the rules. Circumstances
may alter even codes of manners; in Paris, for
instance, it is permissible to sop bread in the
sauce, a practice which is bad form in London—
since nobody would want any more of a British
sauce than could be avoided. This paper, how-
ever, has failed of its purpose if it is taken as a
plea for license. Rather is it intended as an argu-
ment for liberty. It has been written as the re-
sult of a belief that a frank protest is needed now
and again against the excessive demands of the
linguistic dogmatists. That what the linguis-
tic dogmatists write is as widely read as it seems
to be is a sign of a healthy interest in the speech
235

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

which must serve us all, scholars and school-
masters and plain people. This interest should
be aroused also to shake off the shackles with
which pedagogs and pedants seek to restrain not
only the full growth of our noble tongue, but
even its free use. As Renan pithily put it, every
time that " grammarians have tried deliberately to
reform a language, they have succeeded only in
making it heavy, without expression, and often
less logical than the humblest dialect."

If English is to be kept fit to do the mighty
work it bids fair to be called upon to accomplish
in the future, it must be allowed to develop along
the line of least resistance. It must be encouraged
to follow its own bent and to supply its own
needs and to shed its worn-out members. It
must not be hampered by syntax taken from
Latin or by rules evolved out of the inner con-
sciousness of word-critics. It must not be too
squeamish or even too particular, since excessive
refinement goes only with muscular weakness.
It must be allowed to venture on solecisms, on
neologisms, on Americanisms, on Briticisms, on
Australianisms, if need be, however ugly some
of these may seem, for the language uses itself up
fast, and has to be replenished that it shall not
lose its vigor and its ardor.

To say this is not to say that every one of us
who uses English in speaking or in writing should
236

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

not always choose his words carefully and decide
on his forms judiciously. Only by a wise selec-
tion can the language be kept at its highest effi-
ciency; only thus can its full powers be revealed
to us. And if we decide that we prefer to keep
to the very letter of the law as laid down by the
grammarians— why, that is our privilege and no
one shall say us nay. But let us not think scorn
of those who are careless in paying their tithes
of mint and anise and cummin, if also they stand
upright and speak the truth plainly.

For myself— if a personal confession is not
here out of place— I shrink always from profiting
by any license I have just claimed for others; I
strive always to eschew the Split Infinitive, to
avoid and who when there is no preceding who
which may balance it, and to put only always in
the place where it will do most good. It is ever
my aim to avail myself of the phrase which will
convey my meaning into the reader's mind with
the least friction ; and out of the effort to achieve
this approach along the line of least resistance, I
get something of the joy an honest craftsman
ought always to feel in the handling of his tools.
For this is what words are, after all ; they are the
tools of man, devised to serve his daily needs.
As Bagehot once suggested, we may not know
how language was first invented and made, " but
beyond doubt it was shaped and fashioned into
237

QUESTIONS OF USAGE

its present state by common, ordinary men and
women using it for common and ordinary pur-
poses. They wanted a carving-knife, not a razor
or lancet; and those great artists who have to
use language for more exquisite purposes, who
employ it to describe changing sentiments and
momentary fancies and the fluctuating and in-
definite inner world, must use curious nicety and
hidden but effectual artifice, else they cannot
duly punctuate their thoughts and slice the fine
edges of their reflections. A hair's breadth is as
important to them as a yard's breadth to a com-
mon workman."
(1898)

238

X

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

' ¥ HAVE a theory about double rimes for which
I I shall be attacked by the critics, but which
I could justify perhaps on high authority, or, at
least, analogy," wrote Mrs. Browning to a friend
not long after the publication of one of her books.
" These volumes of mine have more double rimes
than any two books of English poems that ever
to my knowledge were printed; I mean of Eng-
lish poems not comic. Now of double rimes in
use which are perfect rimes you are aware how
few there are ; and yet you are also aware of what
an admirable effect in making a rhythm various
and vigorous double riming is in English poetry.
Therefore I have used a certain license; and after
much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers
have ventured it with the public. And do you
tell me— you who object to the use of a different
vowel in a double rime— why you rime (as every-
body does, without blame from everybody) given
to heaven, when you object to my riming remem-
ber to chamber ? The analogy is all on my side,
241

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

and I believe that the spirit of the English lan-
guage is also."

Here Mrs. Browning raises a question of in-
terest to all who have paid any attention to the
technic of verse. No doubt double rimes do
give vigor and variety to a poem, altho no
modern English lyrist has really rivaled the mag-
nificent medieval 'Dies Irse,' wherein the double
rimes thrice repeated fall one after the other like
the beating of mighty trip-hammers. There is
no doubt also that the English language is not so
fertile in double rimes as the Latin, the German,
or the Italian ; and that some of the English poets,
clutching for these various and vigorous effects,
have refused to abide by the strict letter of the
law, and have claimed the license of modifying
the emphatic vowel from one line to another.
Mrs. Browning defends this revolt, and finds it
easy to retort to her correspondent that he him-
self has ventured to link heaven and given. Many
another poet has coupled these unwilling words;
and not a few have also married river and ever,
meadow and shadow, spirit and inherit.

Mrs. Browning is prepared to justify herself by
authority, or at least by analogy ; and yet, in bring-
ing about the espousal of chamber and remember,
she is evidently aware that it is no love-match
she is aiding and abetting, but at best a marriage
of .convenience She pleads precedence to excuse
242

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

her infraction of a statute the general validity of
which she apparently admits. The most that she
claims is that the tying together of chamber and
remember is permissible. She seems to say that
these ill-mated pairs are, of course, not the best
possible rimes, but that, since double rimes are
scarce in English, the lyrist may, now and then,
avail himself of the second best. An American
poet of my acquaintance is bolder than the British
poetess; he has the full courage of his convic-
tions. He assures me that he takes pleasure in
the tying together of incompatible words like
river and ever, meadow and shadow, finding in
these arbitrary matings a capricious and agreeable
relief from the monotony of more regular riming.

This forces us to consider the basis upon which
any theory of " allowable " rimes must rest— any
theory, that is, which, after admitting that certain
rimes are exact and absolutely adequate, asserts
also that certain other combinations of terminal
words, altho they do not rime completely and
to the satisfaction of all, are still tolerable. This
theory accepts certain rimes as good, and it claims
in addition certain others as " good enough."

Any objection to the pairing of spirit and in-
herit, of remember and chamber, and the like,
cannot be founded upon the fact that in the ac-
cepted orthography of the English language the
spelling of the terminations differs. Rime has to
243

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

do with pronunciation and not with orthography;
rime is a match between sounds. The symbols
that represent these sounds— or that may misre-
present them more or less violently— are of little
consequence. What is absurdly called a " rime
to the eye " is a flagrant impossibility, or else hic-
cough may pair off with enough, clean with ocean,
and plague with ague. The eye is not the judge of
sound, any more than the nose is the judge of
color. Height is not a rime to eight; but it is a
rime to sight, to bite, to proselyte, and to indict.
So one does not rime with either gone or tone ;
but it does with son and with bun. Tomb and
comb, and rhomb and bomb are not rimes; but
tomb and doom, and spume and rheum are. The
objection to the linking together of meadow and
shadow, and of ever and river is far deeper than
any superficial difference of spelling; it is rooted
in the difference of the sounds themselves. In
spite of the invention of printing, or even of
writing itself, the final appeal of poetry is still to
the ear and not to the eye.

Probably the first utterances of man were
rhythmic, and probably poetry had advanced far
toward perfection long before the alphabet was
devised as an occasional substitute for speech.
In the beginning the poet had to charm the ears
of those whom he sought to move, since there
was then no way by which he could reach the
244

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

eye also. To the rhapsodists verse was an oral
art solely, as it is always for the dramatists,
whose speeches must fall trippingly from the
tongue, or fail of their effect. The work of the
lyrist— writer of odes, minnesinger, troubadour,
ballad-minstrel—has always been intended to be
said or sung; that it should be read is an after-
thought only. Even to-day, when the printing-
press has us all under its wheels, it is by our
tongues that we possess ourselves of the poetry
we truly relish. A poem is not really ours till
we know it by heart and can say it to ourselves,
or at least until we have read it aloud, and until
we can quote it freely. If a poem has actually
taken hold on our souls, it rings in our ears, even
if we happen to be visualizers also, and can call
up at will the printed page whereon it is pre-
served.

This fact, that poetry is primarily meant to be
spoken aloud rather than read silently, altho
obvious when plainly stated, has not been firmly
grasped by many of those who have considered
the technic of the art, and therefore there is often
obscurity in the current discussions of rime and
rhythm. In the rhetoric of verse there is to-day
not a little of the confusion which existed in the
rhetoric of prose before Herbert Spencer put forth
his illuminating and stimulating essay on the
'Philosophy of Style.' Even in that paper he
245

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

suggested that the principle of Economy of At-
tention was as applicable to verse as to prose;
and he remarked that " were there space, it might
be worth while to inquire whether the pleasure
we take in rime, and also that which we take in
euphony, are not partly ascribable to the same
general cause."

This principle of Economy of Attention ex-
plains why it is that any style of speaking or
writing is more effective than another, by remind-
ing us that we have, at any given moment, only
so much power of attention, and that, there-
fore, however much of this power has to be
employed on the form of any message must be
subtracted from the total power, leaving just so
much less attention available for the apprehen-
sion of the message itself. To convey a thought
from one mind to another, we must use words
the reception of which demands more or less
mental exertion ; and therefore that statement is
best which carries the thought with the least
verbal friction. Some friction there must be
always; but the less there is, the more power of
attention the recipient has left to master the trans-
mitted thought.

It is greatly to be regretted that Spencer did
not spare the space to apply to verse this prin-
ciple, which has been so helpful in the analysis
of prose. He did go so far as to suggest that
246

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

metrical language is more effective than prose,
because when " we habitually preadjust our per-
ceptions to the measured movement of verse " it
is " probable that by so doing we economize
attention." This suggestion has been elaborated
by one of his disciples, the late Mr. Grant Allen, in
his treatise on ' Physiological Esthetics,' and it has
been formally controverted by the late Mr. Gur-
ney, in his essay on the 'Power of Sound.'
Perhaps both Spencer and Gurney are right; part
of our pleasure in rhythm is due to the fact that
" the mind may economize its energies by antici-
pating the attention required for each syllable,"
as the former says, and part of it is " of an en-
tirely positive kind, acting directly on the sense,"
as the latter maintains.

Whether or not Spencer's principle of Economy
of Attention adequately explains our delight in
rhythm, there is no doubt that it can easily be
utilized to construct a theory of rime. Indeed,
it is the one principle which provides a satisfac-
tory solution to the problem propounded by Mrs.
Browning. No one can deny that more or less
of our enjoyment of rimed verse is due to the
skill with which the poet satisfies with the second
rime the expectation he has aroused with the
first. When he ends a line with gray, or grow,
or grand, we do not know which of the two-
score or more of possible rimes to each of these
247

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

the lyrist will select, and we await his choice
with happy anticipation. If he should balk us of
our pleasure, if he should omit the rime we had
confidently counted upon, we are rudely awak-
ened from our dream of delight, and we ask our-
selves abruptly what has happened. It is as
tho the train of thought had run off the track.
Spencer notes how we are put out by halting
versification ; " much as at the bottom of a flight
of stairs a step more or less than we counted
upon gives us a shock, so too does a misplaced
accent or a supernumerary syllable."

So, too, does an inaccurate or an arbitrary rime
give us a shock. If verse is something to be said
or sung, if its appeal is to the ear primarily, if
rime is a terminal identity of sound, then any
theory of "allowable" rimes is impossible, since
an "allowable" rime is necessarily inexact, and
thus may tend to withdraw attention from the
matter of the poem to its manner. No doubt
there are readers who do not notice the incom-
patibility of these matings, and there are others
who notice yet do not care. But the more accu-
rately trained the ear is, the more likely these
alliances are to annoy ; and the less exact the rime,
the more likely the ear is to discover the discre-
pancy. The only safety for the rimester who
wishes to be void of all offense is to risk no
union of sounds against whose marriage anybody
248

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

knows any just cause of impediment. Perhaps
a wedding within the prohibited degrees may be
allowed to pass without protest now and again;
but sooner or later somebody will surely forbid
the banns.

Just as a misplaced accent or a supernumerary
syllable gives us a shock, so does the attempt of
Mrs. Browning to pair off remember and chamber ;
so may also the attempt of Poe to link together
valleys and palace. The lapse from the perfect
ideal may be but a trifle, but a lapse it is never-
theless. A certain percentage of our available
attention may thus be wasted, and worse than
wasted; it may be called away from the poem
itself, and absorbed suddenly by the mere versi-
fication. For a brief moment we may be forced
to consider a defect of form, when we ought to
have our minds absolutely free to receive the
poet's meaning. Whenever a poet cheats us of
our expectancy of perfect rime, he forces us to
pay exorbitant freight charges on the gift he has
presented to us.

It is to be noted, however, that as rime is a
matching of sounds, certain pairs of words whose
union is not beyond reproach can hardly be re-
jected without pedantry, since the ordinary pro-
nunciation of cultivated men takes no account of
the slight differences of sound audible if the
words are'uttered with absolute precision. Thus
249

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

Tennyson in the ' Revenge ' rimes Devon and
Heaven ; and thus Lowell in the ' Fable for Cri-
tics ' rimes irresistible and untwistable. In ' Elsie
Venner' Dr. Holmes held up to derision "the
inevitable rime of cockney and Yankee beginners,
morn and dawn" \ but, at the risk of revealing
myself as a Yankee of New York, I must confess
that any pronunciation of this pair of words
seems to me stilted that does not make them
quite impeccable as a rime.

We are warned, however, to be on our guard
against pushing any principle to an absurd ex-
treme. If certain pairs of words have been sent
forth into the world by English poets from a time
whereof the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary, then perhaps they may now plead pre-
scription whenever any cold-hearted commen-
tator is disposed to doubt the legitimacy of their
conjunction. Altho the union is forbidden by
the strict letter of the law,— like marriage with a
deceased wife's sister in England,— only the cen-
sorious are disposed to take the matter into court.
In time certain rimes— falsely so called— "are
legitimated by custom," one British critic has
declared, citing love and prove, for example, and
asserting that " river has just got to rime with
ever or the game cannot be played." You must
have forgiven or you will never get to heaven.
"We expect these licenses and do not resent
250

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

them, as we do resent Poe's valleys and palace
and the eccentricities of Mrs. Browning." That
there is force in this contention cannot be denied ;
but it must be remembered that those who urge
it are necessarily lovers of poetry, or at least fairly
familiar with a large body of English verse, or
else they would not be aware of the fact that love
and prove, heaven and given, have often been tied
together. But even if these critics, who have
been sophisticated by over-familiarity with poetic
license, do not resent this pairing of unequal
sounds, it does not follow that those who for the
first time hear dove linked with Jove are equally
forgiving or negligent. Even if these licenses
are pardoned by some as venial offenses, there
are others whose ears are annoyed by them and
whose attention is distracted. In other words,
we are here face to face with the personal equa-
tion ; and the only way for a writer of verse to
be certain that one or another of his rimes will
not be resented by this reader or that is to make
sure that all his marriages are flawless.

Thus and thus only can he avoid offense with
absolute certainty. If his rimes are perfect to the
ear when read aloud or recited, then they will
never divert the attention of the auditor from the
matter of the poem to the mere manner. On the
other hand, it is only fair to confess that there
are some lovers of poetry who find a charm in
251

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

lawlessness and in eccentricity. A series of per-
fect rimes pleases them; but so also does an
occasional rime in which the vowel is slightly
varied. And the poet's consolation for the loss
of these must lie in the knowledge that he can-
not hope to satisfy everybody. Consolation may
lie also in the belief that any lapse from the per-
fect rime is dangerous, for even if there are some
who enjoy the divergence when it is delicate,—
that is, when the vowel sound, even if not abso-
lutely identical, is sympathetically akin,— there
are very few who are not annoyed when the
difference becomes as obvious as in the attempt
to link together dial and ball or water and clear.
And as it is only a sophisticated ear which en-
joys the mating of valleys with palace, for ex-
ample, so the attempted rime of this type is to
be found chiefly in the more labored poets— in
those who are consciously literary. The primi-
tive lyrist, the unconscious singer who makes a
ballad of a May morning or rimes a jingle for the
nursery or puts together a couplet to give point
to a fragment of proverbial wisdom, is nearly
always exact in the repetition of his vowel.
Where he is careless is in the accompanying
consonants. As is remarked by the British critic
from whom quotation has already been made,
"we may observe that in all early European
poetry, from the ' Song of Roland ' to the popular
252

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

ballads, the ear was satisfied with assonance, that
is, the harmony of the vowel sounds; bat is as-
sonant to tag, and that was good enough." So
in the proverbial couplet,

See a pin and pick it up,

All day long you '11 have good luck.

So again more than once in the unaffected lyrics
of the laureate of the nursery, Mother Goose:

Goosy, goosy gander,

Where do you wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,

And in my lady's chamber.

Leave them alone

And they will come borne.

This assonance is visible in the linking of wild
wood and childhood, which many versifiers have
proffered as tho it was a double rime ; it is to
be seen again in Whittier's main land and train-
band ; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte's ' Her
Letter ' :

Of that ride— that to me was the rarest;

Of —the something you said at the gate.
Ah! Joe, then I was n't an heiress

To the best-paying lead in the State.

Altho this substitution of assonance for rime
is uncommon in the more literary lyrics, which

253

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

we may suppose to have been composed with
the pen, it is still frequently to be found in the
popular song, born on the lips of the singer, and
set down in black and white only as an after-
thought. It abounds in the college songs which
have been sung into being, and in the brisk bal-
lads of the variety-show— which Planche neatly
characterized as " most music-hall, most melan-
choly." In one dime song-book containing the
words set to music by Mr. David Braham to en-
liven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan's amusing
pictures of life among the lowly in the tenement-
house districts of New York, there can be dis-
covered at least a dozen instances of this use of
assonance as tho it were rime :

De gal's name is Nannie,

And she 's just left her mammie.

He can get a pair of crutches
From the doctor, it 's well known,

And feel like the King of Persia,
When he goes marching borne.

One husband was a toper ,
The other was a loafer.

'T is there the solid voters
Wear Piccadilly chokers.

On Sundays, then, the ladies

With a hundred million babies.

254

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

To the poor of suffering Ireland:

Time and time again ;
We thank you for our countrymen,

And Donavan is our name.

When these lines are sung, rough as they are,
the ear is satisfied by the absolute identity of the
final vowel, upon which the voice lingers— while
the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed.
It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of
those who heard these songs ever discovered any
deficiency in the rimes. In more literary ballads
only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard ;
but in folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance
seems to be legal tender by tacit convention.
When Benedick was trying to make a copy of
verses for Beatrice, he declared that he could
"find out no rime to lady but baby, an inno-
cent rime "—a remark which shows us that Bene-
dick's theory of riming was much the same as
Mr. Harrigan's.

Probably, however, the attempt to substitute
assonance for rime would be resented by many
of the readers who are tolerant toward such de-
partures from exactness as heaven and shriven or
grove and dove. That is to say, the unliterary ear
insists on the identity of the vowel while careless
as to the consonant, and the literary ear insists on
the identity of the consonant while not quite so
careful as to the vowel. And here is another

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

reason for exact accuracy, which satisfies alike
the learned and the unlearned, and is also in
accord with Herbert Spencer's principle. It is
true, probably, that such minor divergencies as
the mating of borne and alone and of shadow and
meadow— to take one of each class— are not gene-
rally conscious on the part of the poet himself.
Nor are they generally noticed by the reader or
the auditor; and even when noticed they are not
always resented as offensive. But just so long
as there is a chance that they may be noticed and
that they may be resented, they had best be
avoided. The poet avails himself of his license
at his peril. That way danger lies.

It is in the ' Adventures of Philip ' that Thacke-
ray records his hero's disapproval of a poet who
makes fire rime with Marire. Even if the rime
is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convict-
ing the lyrist of carelessness of speech— not to
call it vulgarity of pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes
himself, sharp as he was upon those who rimed
dawn and morn, was none the less guilty of a
peccadillo quite as reprehensible— Elizas and ad-
vertisers. Whittier ventured to chain Eva not
only with leave her and receive her, which sug-
gest a slovenly utterance, but also with give her,
river, and never, which are all of them wrenched
from their true sounds to force them unto a vain
and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred
256

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

cockney recklessness can be found in one of
Mrs. Browning's misguided modernizations of
Chaucer:

Now grant my ship some smooth haven win her ;
\ follow Statius first, and then Corinna.

In each of these cases the poet takes out a wed-
ding license for his couplet, only at the cost of
compelling the reader to miscall the names of
these ladies, and to address them as Marire,
Either, Ever, and Corinner ; and tho the rimes
themselves are thus placed beyond reproach, the
poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and
precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of
pronunciation is as disenchanting as any vulgarity
in grammar.

Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that
makes these rimes are certain of Mr. Kipling's,
as to which we are a little in doubt whether he
is making his rime by violence to the normal
sound or whether his own pronunciation is so
abnormal that the rime itself seems to him accu-
rate:

Railways and roads they wrought
For the needs of the soil within ;

A time to scribble in court.
A time to bear and grin.

Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished

quarters,
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's

daughters.

257

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

I quarrel with my wife at home.

We never fight abroad;
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact,

I am her only lord.

Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness,
and yet akin to it, is the trick of forcing an em-
phasis upon a final syllable which is naturally
short, in order that it may be made to rime with
a syllable which is naturally long. For example,
in the exquisite lyric of Lovelace's, ' To Althea
from Prison,' in the second quatrain of the second
stanza we find that we must prolong the final
syllable of the final word :

When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,

Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberf^.

Here the rime evades us unless we read the
last word libertee. But what then are we to do
with the same word in the second quatrain of the
first stanza ? To get his rime here, the poet in-
sists on our reading the last word libertie :

When I lie tangled in her hair

And fettered to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air

Know no such liber/y.

Lovelace thus forces us not only to give an
arbitrary pronunciation to the final word of his
258

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

refrain, but also to vary this arbitrary pronuncia-
tion from stanza to stanza, awkwardly arresting
our attention to no purpose, when we ought to
be yielding ourselves absolutely to the charm of
his most charming poem. Many another instance
of this defect in craftsmanship can be discovered
in the English poets, one of them in a lyric by
that master of metrics, Poe, who opens the
' Haunted Palace ' with a quatrain in which ten-
anted is made to mate with head :

In the greenest of our valleys,

By good angels ten an ted,
Once a fair and stately palace —

Radiant palace — reared its bead.

In the one poem of Walt Whitman's in which
he seemed almost willing to submit to the bonds
of rime and meter, and which— perhaps for that
reason partly— is the lyric of his now best known
and best beloved, in ' O Captain, My Captain,'
certain of the rimes are possible only by putting
an impossible stress upon the final syllables of
both words of the pair:

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.

And again:

For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths, for you the shores

a-crowding ;

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning,
259

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

In all these cases— Lovelace's, Poe's, Whit-
man's—we find that the principle of Economy of
Attention has been violated, with a resulting
shock which diminishes somewhat our pleasure
in the poems, delightful as they are, each in its
several way. We have been called to bestow a
momentary consideration on the mechanism of
the poem, when we should have preferred to
reserve all our power to receive the beauty of its
spirit.

It may be doubted whether any pronunciation,
however violently dislocated, can justify Whit-
tier's joining of bruised and crusade in his ' To
England,' or Browning's conjunction of -windows
and Hindus in his 'Youth and Art' In ' Cris-
tina' Browning tries to combine moments and
endowments ; in his 'Another Way of Love' he
conjoins spider and consider ; and in his 'Solilo-
quy in a Spanish Cloister' he binds together
horse-hairs and corsair's. Perhaps one reason
why Browning has made his way so slowly with
the broad public— whom every poet must conquer
at last, or in the end confess defeat— is that his
rimes are sometimes violent and awkward, and
sometimes complicated and arbitrary. The poet
has reveled in his own ingenuity in compounding
them, and so he flourishes them in the face of
the reader. The principle of Economy of Atten-
tion demands that in serious verse the rime must
260

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

be not only so accurate as to escape remark, but
also wholly unstrained. It must seem natural,
necessary, obvious, even inevitable, or else our
minds are wrested from a rapt contemplation of
the theme to a disillusioning consideration of the
sounds by which it is bodied forth.

" Really the meter of some of the modern
poems I have read," said Coleridge, " bears about
the same relation to meter, properly understood,
that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exer-
cise, and pretty severe too, I think." A master
of meter Browning proved himself again and
again, very inventive in the new rhythms he in-
troduced, and almost unfailingly felicitous; and
yet there are poems of his in which the rimes
impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise.
In the 'Glove,' for example, there not only
abound manufactured rimes, each of which in
turn arrests the attention, and each of which
demands a most conscientious articulation before
the ear can apprehend it, but with a persistent
perversity the poet puts the abnormal combina-
tion first, and puts last the normal word with
which it is to be united in wedlock. Thus agbast
I 'm precedes pastime, and well swear comes be-
fore elsewhere. This is like presenting us with
the answer before propounding the riddle.

In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily van-
quished may be a part of the joke, and an adroit
261

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

and unexpected rime may be a witticism in itself.
But irr the ' Ingoldsby Legends ' and in the ' Fable
for Critics ' it is generally the common word that
comes before the uncommon combination the
alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a
line of Barham's ends with Mepbistopheles we
wonder how he is going to solve the difficulty,
and our expectation is swiftly gratified with
coffee lees; and when Lowell informs us that
Poe

. . . talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,

we bristle our ears while he adds :

In a way to make people of common sense damn meters.

But the 'Glove' is not comic in intent; the
core of it is tragic, and the shell is at least ro-
mantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant playfulness
of treatment might not be out of keeping with
the psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but
not a few readers resentfully reject the misplaced
ingenuity of the wilfully artificial double rimes.
The incongruity between the matter of the poem
and the manner of it attracts attention to the form,
and leaves us the less for the fact.

It would be interesting to know just why
Browning chose to do what he did in the ' Glove '
and in more than one other poem. He had his
reasons, doubtless, for he was no unconscious
warbler of unpremeditated lays. If he refused to
262

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention,
he knew what he was doing. It was not from
any heedlessness— like that of Emerson when he
recklessly rimed woodpecker with bear ; or like
that of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming
the same woodpecker with bear. Emerson and
Lowell— and Whittier also— it may be noted,
were none of them enamoured of technic; and
when a couplet or a quatrain or a stanza of theirs
happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently
they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a
fortunate accident. They were not untiring
students of versification, forever seeking to spy
out its mysteries and to master its secrets, as
Milton was, and Tennyson and Poe.

And yet no critic has more satisfactorily ex-
plained the essential necessity of avoiding dis-
cords than did Lowell when he affirmed that
" not only meter but even rime itself is not with-
out suggestion in outward nature. Look at the
pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza,
how spray answers to spray, strophe and anti-
strophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied
ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of propor-
tion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt
the innate charm of rime who has seen the blue
river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been
ravished by the visible consonance of the tree
263

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

growing at once toward an upward and a down-
ward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or
who has watched how, as the kingfisher flitted
from shore to shore, his visible echo flies under
him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the
visionary vault below ? . . . You must not only
expect, but you must expect in the right way;
you must be magnetized beforehand in every
fiber by your own sensibility in order that you
may feel what and how you ought."

Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe,
who declared that " what, in rime, first and prin-
cipally pleases, may be referred to the human
sense or appreciation of equality." But there is
no equality in the sound of -valleys and palace,
and so the human sense is robbed of its plea-
sure; and there is no consonance, visible or
audible, between woodpecker and bear, and so
we are suddenly demagnetized by our own sen-
sibility, and cannot feel what and how we
ought.

So long as the poet gives us rimes exact to the
ear and completely satisfactory to the sense to
which they appeal, he has solid ground beneath
his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos
come again. Admit given and heaven, and it is
hard to deny chamber and remember. Having
relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound,
you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy.
264

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

Allow shadow and meadow to be legitimate, and
how can you put the bar sinister on bear and
woodpecker ? Indeed, we fail to see how you
can help feeling that John Phoenix was unduly
harsh when he rejected the poem of a Young
Astronomer beginning, " O would I had a tele-
scope with fourteen slides!" on account of the
atrocious attempt in the second line to rime
Pleiades with slides.

Lieutenant Derby was a humorist; but is his
tying together of incompatible vocables much
worse than one offense of which Keats is guilty ?

Then who would go

Into dark Soho,
And chatter with dack'd-haired critics,

When he can stay

For the new-mown hay
And startle the dappled prickets ?

This quotation is due to Professor F. N. Scott,
who has drawn attention also to an astounding
quatrain of Tennyson's ' Palace of Art ' :

Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea,
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair

Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
An angel look'd at ber.

Professor Scott declares that he hesitates " for
a term by which to characterize such rimes as
these. Certainly they are not eye-rimes in the
265

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

proper meaning of that term. Perhaps . . . they
may be called nose-rimes."

Just as every instance of bad grammar inter-
feres with the force of prose, so in verse every
needless inversion and every defective rime in-
terrupts the impression which the poet wishes to
produce. There are really not so many in Pope's
poems as there may seem to be, for since
Queen Anne's day our language has modified its
pronunciation here and there, leaving now only
to the Irish the tea which is a perfect rime to
obey, and the join which is a perfect rime to line.

Perhaps the prevalence in English verse of the
intolerable " allowable rimes " is due in part to an
acceptance of what seems like an evil precedent,
to be explained away by our constantly chang-
ing pronunciation. Perhaps it is due in part also
to the present wretched orthography of our lan-
guage. The absurd " rimes to the eye " which
abound in English are absent from Italian verse
and from French. The French, as the inheritors
through the Latin of the great Greek tradition,
have a finer respect for form, and strive con-
stantly for perfection of technic, altho the ge-
nius of their language seems to us far less lyric
than ours. Theodore de Banville, in his little
book on French versification, declared formally
and emphatically that there is no such thing as a
poetic license. And Voltaire, in a passage ad-
266

AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

mirably rendered into English by the late Fred-
erick Locker-Lampson, says that the French
" insist that the rime shall cost nothing to the
ideas, that it shall be neither trivial, nor too far-
fetched; we exact vigorously in a verse the same
purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do
not admit the smallest license; we require an
author to carry without a break all these chains,
yet that he should appear ever free."

In a language as unrhythmic as the French,
rime is far more important than it need be in a
lilting and musical tongue like our own; but in
the masterpieces of the English lyrists, as in those
of the French, rime plays along the edges of a
poem, ever creating the expectation it swiftly
satisfies and giving most pleasure when its pre-
sence is felt and not flaunted. Like the dress of
the well-bred woman, which sets off her beauty
without attracting attention to itself, rime must
be adequate and unobtrusive, neither too fine nor
too shabby, but always in perfect taste.
(1898-1900)

267

XI

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-
NAMES

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

r)LUTARCH tells us that the tragedian

1 pus, when he spoke the opening lines of

the ' Atreus,' a tragedy by Attius,

I 'm Lord of Argos, heir of Pel ops' crown.
As far as Helle's sea and Ion's main
Beat on the Isthmus,

entered so keenly into the spirit of this lofty
passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave
who approached too near to the person of roy-
alty; and Professor Tyrrel notes how these verses
affect us with "the weight of names great in
myth-land and hero-land," and he suggests that
they produce "a vague impression of majesty,"
like Milton's

Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban,
Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric's shore,
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia.

It is a question how far the beauty of the reso-
nant lines of the ' Agamemnon ' of ^schylus,
271

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

where the news of the fall of Troy is flashed
along the chain of beacons from hilltop to pro-
montory, is due even more to the mere sounds of
the proper names than it is to the memories these
mighty names evoke. Far inferior to this, and
yet deriving its effect also from the sonorous roll
of the lordly proper names (which had perhaps
lingered in the poet's memory ever since the
travels of his childhood), is the passage in the
' Hernani ' of Victor Hugo, when, the new em-
peror ordering all the conspirators to be set free
who are not of noble blood, the hero steps for-
ward hotly to declare his rank:

Puisqu'il faut etre grand pour mourir, je me leve.
Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
M'a fait due de Segorbe et due de Cardona,
Marquis de Mouroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j 'ignore le compte.
Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maitre d'Avis, ne
Dans 1'exil, fils proscrit d'un pere assassine
Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille!

Lowell, after telling us that " precisely what
makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot
explain any more than we can describe a per-
fume," proceeds to point out that it is a prosaic
passage of Drayton's ' Polyolbion ' which gave a
hint to Wordsworth, thus finely utilized in one
of the later bard's ' Poems on the Naming of
Places ' :

272

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn, far into the clear blue sky,
Carried the Lady's voice, — old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet; — back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

Not a little of this same magic is there in many
a line of Walt Whitman; especially did he rejoice
to point out the beauty of Manahatta:

I was asking something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

Longfellow has recorded his feeling that

The destined walls
Of Cambalu and of Cathain Can

(from the eleventh book of ' Paradise Lost ') is a
" delicious line." Longfellow was always singu-
larly sensitive to the magic power of words, and
not long after that entry in his journal there is
this other: "I always write the name October
with especial pleasure. There is a secret charm
about it, not to be defined. It is full of memo-
273

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

ries, it is full of dusky splendors, it is full of
glorious poetry." And Poe was so taken with
the melody of this same word that in ' Ulalume '
he invented a proper name merely that he might
have a rime for it:

It was night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid-region of Weir —
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

The charm of these lines is due mainly to their
modulated music, and to the contrast of the
vowel sounds in Auber and Weir, just as a great
part of the beauty of Lander's exquisite lyric,
'Rose Aylmer,' is contained in the name itself.
Is there any other reason why Mesopotamia
should be a " blessed word," save that its vowels
and its consonants are so combined as to fill the
ear with sweetness ? Yet Mr. Lecky records
Garrick's assertion that Whitefield could pro-
nounce Mesopotamia so as to make a congregation
weep. And others have found delight in repeat-
ing a couplet of CampbelFs:

And heard across the waves' tumultuous roar
The wolfs long howl from Oonalaska's shore —

a delight due, I think, chiefly to the unexpected
combination of open vowels and sharp conso-

274

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

nants in the single Eskimo word, the meaning of
it being unknown and wholly unimportant, and
the sound of it filling the ear with an uncertain
and yet awaited pleasure.

Just as Oonalaska strikes us at once as the fit
title for a shore along which the lone wolf should
howl, so Atchafalaya bears in its monotonous
vowel a burden of melancholy, made more piti-
ful to us by our knowledge that it was the name
of the dark water where Evangeline and Gabriel
almost met in the night and then parted again
for years. Charles Sumner wrote to Longfellow
that Mrs. Norton considered " the scene on the
Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each
other, so typical of life that she had a seal cut
with that name upon it " ; and shortly afterward
Leopold, the King of the Belgians, speaking of
' Evangeline,' " asked her if she did not think the
word Atchafalaya was suggestive of experience
in life, and added that he was about to have it
cut on a seal "—whereupon, to his astonishment,
she showed him hers.

It would be difficult indeed to declare how
much of the delight our ear may take in these
words— Atchafalaya, Oonalaska, Mesopotamia,
—is due simply to their own melody, and how
much to the memories they may stir. Here we
may see one reason why the past seems so much
more romantic than the present. In tales of
275

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

olden time even the proper names linger in our
ears with an echo of " the glory that was Greece
and the grandeur that was Rome." Here is, in
fact, an unfair advantage which dead-and-gone
heroes of foreign birth have over the men of our
own day and our own country. " If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it
is that we are already domesticating the same
sentiment," said Emerson in his essay on ' Hero-
ism,' and he added that the first step of our
worthiness was " to disabuse us of our supersti-
tious associations with places and times." And
he asks, " Why should these words, Athenian,
Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear?
Where the heart is, there the muses, there the
gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.
Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston
Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves
the names of foreign and classic topography.
But here we are ; and if we hurry a little, we may
come to learn that here is best. . . . The Jer-
seys were honest ground enough for Washing-
ton to tread."

Emerson penned these sentences in the first
half of the nineteenth century, when we Ameri-
cans were still fettered by the inherited shackles
of colonialism. Fifty years after he wrote, it
would have been hard to find an American who
thought either Boston Bay or Massachusetts a
276

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

paltry place. And Matthew Arnold has recorded
that to him, when he was an undergraduate,
Emerson was then " but a voice speaking from
three thousand miles away; but so well he spoke
that from that time forth Boston Bay and Con-
cord were names invested to my ear with a sen-
timent akin to that which invests for me the
names of Oxford and Weimar."

As for the Connecticut River, had not Thoreau
done it the service Irving had rendered long be-
fore to the Hudson ?— had he not given it a right
to be set down in the geography of literature ?
It is well that we should be reminded now and
again that the map which the lover of letters has
in his mind's eye is different by a whole world
from the projection which the school-boy smears
with his searching finger, since the tiny little
rivers on whose banks great men grew to ma-
turity, the Tiber and the Po, the Seine and the
Thames, flow across its pages with a fuller
stream than any Kongo or Amazon. And on
this literary map the names of not a few Ameri-
can rivers and hills and towns are now inscribed.

It is fortunate that many of the American places
most likely to be mentioned in the poetic gazet-
teer have kept the liquid titles the aborigines
gave them. " I climbed one of my hills yester-
day afternoon and took a sip of Wachusett, who
was well content that Monadnock was out of the
277

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

way," wrote Lowell in a letter. "How lucky
our mountains (many of them) are in their names,
tho they must find it hard to live up to them
sometimes! The Anglo-Saxon sponsor would
Nicodemus 'em to nothing in no time." It will
be pitiful if the Anglo-Saxons on the Pacific coast
allow Mount Tacoma to be Nicodemused to
Mount Rainier, as the Anglo-Saxons of the At-
lantic coast allowed Lake Andiatarocte to be
Nicodemused into Lake George. Fenimore
Cooper strove in vain for the acceptance of Hori-
con as the name of this lovely sheet of water,
which the French discoverer called the Lake of
the Holy Sacrament.

Marquette spoke of a certain stream as the
River of the Immaculate Conception, altho
the Spaniards were already familiar with it as
the River of the Holy Spirit; and later La Salle
called it after Colbert; but an Algonquin word
meaning " many waters " clung to it always; and
so we know it now as the Mississippi. The
Spaniard has been gone from its banks for more
than a hundred years, and the Frenchman has
followed the Indian, and the Anglo-Saxon now
holds the mighty river from its source to its many
mouths; but the broad stream bears to-day the
name the red men gave it. And so also the Ohio
keeps its native name, tho the French hesi-
tated between St. Louis and La Belle Riviere
278

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

as proper titles for it. Cataraqui is one old
name for an American river, and Jacques Cartier
accepted for this stream another Indian word,
Hochelaga, but (as Professor Hinsdale reminded
us) " St. Lawrence, the name that Cartier had
given to the Gulf, unfortunately superseded it."

Much of the charm of these Indian words,
Atchafalaya, Ohio, Andiatarocte, Tacoma, is due
no doubt to their open vowels; but is not some
of it to be ascribed to our ignorance of their
meanings ? We may chance to know that Mis-
sissippi signifies " many waters " and that Min-
nehaha can be interpreted as "laughing water,"
but that is the furthermost border of our know-
ledge. If we were all familiar with the Algon-
quin dialects, I fancy that the fascination of many
of these names would fade swiftly. And yet
perhaps it would not, for we could never be on
as friendly terms with the Indian language as we
are with our own; and there is ever a suggestion
of the mystic in the foreign tongue.

We engrave Souvenir on our sweetheart's
bracelet or brooch ; but the French for this pur-
pose prefer Remember. " The difficulty of trans-
lation lies in the color of words," Longfellow
declared. " Is the Italian ruscilletto gorgoglioso
fully rendered by gurgling brooklet? Or the
Spanish pajaros 'vocingleros by garrulous birds ?
Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only
279

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds;
and to the Italian and Spanish ear the English
words may seem equally beautiful."

After the death of the Duke of Wellington,
Longfellow wrote a poem on the ' Warden of
the Cinque Ports ' ; and to us Americans there was
poetry in the very title. And yet it may be
questioned whether the Five Ports are necessarily
any more poetic than the Five Points or the
Seven Dials. So also Sanguelac strikes us as far
loftier than Bloody Pond, but is it really ? I have
wondered often whether to a Jew of the first
century Aceldama, the field of blood, and Golgo-
tha, the place of a skull, were not perfectly com-
monplace designations, quite as common, in fact,
as Bone Gulch or Hangman's Hollow would be
to us, and conveying the same kind of suggestion.

We are always prone to accept the unknown
as the magnificent,— if I may translate the Latin
phrase, —to put a higher value on the things veiled
from us by the folds of a foreign language. The
Bosporus is a more poetic place than Oxford,
tho the meaning of both names is the same.
Montenegro fills our ears and raises our expecta-
tions higher than could any mere Black Mountain.
The "Big River" is but a vulgar nickname, and
yet we accept the equivalent Guadalquivir and
Rio Grande; we even allow ourselves sometimes
to speak of the Rio Grande River— which is as
280

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

tautological as De Quincey declared the name of
Mrs. Barbauld to be. Bridgeport is as prosaic
as may be, while Alcantara has a remote and
romantic aroma, and yet the latter word signifies
only "the bridge." We can be neighborly,
most of us, with the White Mountains; but we
feel a deeper respect for Mont Blanc and the
Weisshorn and the Sierra Nevada.

Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily
to force them into an imported falsehood. El-
beron, where Garfield died, was founded by one
L. B. Brown, so they say, and the homely name
of the owner was thus contorted to make a seem-
ingly exotic appellation for the place. And they
say also that the man who once dammed a brook
amid the pines of New Jersey had three children,
Carrie, Sally, and Joe, and that he bestowed their
united names upon Lake Carasaljo, the artificial
piece of water on the banks of which Lakewood
now sits salubriously. In Mr. Cable's 'John
March, Southerner,' one of the characters ex-
plains: "You know an ancestor of his founded
Suez. That 's how it got its name. His name
was Ezra and hers was Susan, don't you see ? "
And I have been told of a town on the Northern
Pacific Railroad which the first comers called
Hell-to-Pay, and which has since experienced a
change of heart and become Eltopia.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a
281

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

thirst for self-improvement raged among the vil-
lages of the lower Hudson River, and many a
modest settlement thought to better itself and to
rise in the world by the assumption of a more
swelling style and title. When a proposition was
made to give up the homely Dobbs Ferry for
something less plebeian, the poet of ' Nothing to
Wear' rimed a pungent protest:

They say " Dobbs " ain't melodious;
It 's " horrid," " vulgar," " odious";

In all their crops it sticks;
And then the worse addendum
Of " Ferry " does offend 'em

More than its vile prefix.
Well, it does seem distressing,
But, if 1 'm good at guessing,

Each one of these same nobs
If there was money in it,
Would ferry in a minute,

And change his name to Dobbs!

That 's it— they 're not partic'lar
Respecting the auric'lar

At a stiff market rate;
But Dobbs's special vice is
That he keeps down the prices

Of all their real estate!
A name so unattractive
Keeps villa-sites inactive,

And spoils the broker's jobs;
They think that speculation
Would rage at " Paulding's Station,"

Which stagnates now at " Dobbs."
282

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

In the later stanzas Mr. Butler denounces
changes nearer to New York :

Down there, on old Manhattan,
Where land-sharks breed and fatten,

They wiped out Tubby Hook.
That famous promontory,
Renowned in song and story,

Which time nor tempest shook,
Whose name for aye had been good,
Stands newly christened " Inwood,"

And branded with the shame
Of some old rogue who passes
By dint of aliases,

Afraid of his own name!

See how they quite outrival
Plain barn-yard Spuyten Duyvil

By peacock Riverdale,
Which thinks all else it conquers,
And over homespun Yonkers

Spreads out its flaunting tail!

No loyal Manhattaner but would regret to part
with Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers and Harlem,
and the other good old names that recall the good
old Dutchmen who founded New Amsterdam.
Few loyal Manhattaners, I think, but would be
glad to see the Greater New York (now at last
an accomplished fact) dignified by a name less
absurd than New York. If Pesth and Buda could
come together and become Budapest, why may
not the Greater New York resume the earlier
283

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

name and be known to the world as Manhattan ?
Why should the people of this great city of ours
let the Anglo-Saxons " Nicodemus us to nothing,"
or less than nothing, with a name so pitiful as
New York? "I hope and trust," wrote Wash-
ington Irving, " that we are to live to be an old
nation, as well as our neighbors, and have no
idea that our cities when they shall have attained
to venerable antiquity shall still be dubbed New
York and New London and new this and new
that, like the Pont Neuf (the new bridge) at Paris,
which is the oldest bridge in that capital, or like
the Vicar of Wakefield's horse, which continued
to be called the colt until he died of old age."

Whenever any change shall be made we must
hope that the new will be not only more eupho-
nious than the old, but more appropriate and
more stately. Perhaps Hangtown in California
made a change for the better many years ago
when it took the name of Placerville; but per-
haps Placerville was not the best name it could
have taken. " We will be nothing but Anglo-
Saxons in the old world or in the new," wrote
Matthew Arnold when he was declaring the
beauty of Celtic literature ; " and when our race
has built Bold Street in Liverpool, and pro-
nounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlan-
tic, and builds Nashville and Jacksonville and
Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs
284

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

of Providence in an incomparable manner." In
this sentence the criticism cuts both British habits
and American. Later in life Matthew Arnold
sharpened his knife again for use on the United
States alone. "What people," he asked, "in
whom the sense for beauty and fitness was
quick, could have invented or tolerated the hide-
ous names ending in ville — the Briggsvilles,
Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles— rife from Maine to
Florida ? "

Now, it must be confessed at once that we
have no guard against a thrust like that. Such
names do abound and they are of unsurpassed
hideousness. But could not the same blow have
got home as fatally had it been directed against
his own country ? A glance at any gazetteer of
the British Isles would show that the British are
quite as vulnerable as the Americans. In fact,
this very question of Matthew Arnold's sug-
gested to an anonymous American rimester the
perpetration of a copy of verses, the quality of
which can be gaged by these first three stanzas :

Of Briggsville and Jacksonville

I care not now to sing;
They make me sad and very mad —

My inmost soul they wring.
I '11 hie me back to England,

And straightway I will go
To Boxford and to Swaffham,

To Plunger and Loose Hoe.
285

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

At Scrooby and at Gonerby,

At Wigton and at Smeeth,
At Bottesford and Runcorn,

I need not grit my teeth.
At Swineshead and at Crummock,

At Sibsey and Spithead,
Stoke Poges and Wolsoken

I will not wish me dead.

At Horbling and at Skidby,

At Chipping Ongar, too,
At Botterel Stotterdon and Swops,

At Skellington and Skew,
At Piddletown and Blumsdown,

At Shanklin and at Smart,
At Gosberton and Wrangle

I '11 soothe this aching heart.

To discover a mote in our neighbor's eyes does
not remove the mote in our own, however much
immediate relief it may give us from the acute-
ness of our pain. When Matthew Arnold ani-
madverted upon " the jumbles of unnatural and
inappropriate names everywhere," he may have
had in mind the most absurd medley existing
anywhere in the world— the handful of Greek
and Roman names of all sorts which was sown
broadcast over the western part of New York
State. Probably this region of misfortune it was
that Irving was thinking about when he de-
nounced the " shallow affectation of scholarship,"
and told how "the whole catalog of ancient
286

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

worthies is shaken out of the back of Lempriere's
Classical Dictionary, and a wide region of wild
country is sprinkled over with the names of
heroes, poets, sages of antiquity, jumbled into
the most whimsical juxtaposition."

Along the road from Dublin, going south to
Bray, the traveler finds Dumdrum and Stillor-
gan, as tho— to quote the remarks of the Irish
friend who gave me these facts— a band of
wandering musicians had broken up and scat-
tered their names along the highway. For sheer
ugliness it would be hard to beat two other
proper names near Dublin, where the Sallynoggin
road runs into the Glenageary.

It may be that these words sound harsher in
our strange ears than they do to a native wonted
to their use. We take the unknown for the
magnificent sometimes, no doubt; but sometimes
also we take it for the ridiculous. To us New-
Yorkers, for instance, there is nothing absurd or
ludicrous in the sturdy name of Schenectady;
perhaps there is even a hint of stateliness in the
syllables. But when Mr. Laurence Hutton was
in the north of Scotland some years ago there
happened to be in his party a young lady from
that old Dutch town; and when a certain laird
who lived in those parts chanced to be told that
this young lady dwelt in Schenectady he was
moved to inextinguishable laughter. He ejacu-
287

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

lated the outlandish sounds again and again in
the sparse intervals of his boisterous merriment.
He announced to all his neighbors that among
their visitors was a young lady from Schenectady,
and all who called were presented to her, and at
every repetition of the strange syllables his vio-
lent cachinnations broke forth afresh. Never had
so comic a name fallen upon his ears ; and yet he
himself was the laird of Balduthro (pronounced
Balduthy) ; his parish was Ironcross (pronounced
Aron-crouch) ; his railway-station was Kilcon-
quhar (pronounced Kinocher) ; and his post-office
was Pittenweem!

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotchman who
had changed his point of view more often than
the laird of Balduthro; he had a broader vision
and a more delicate ear and a more refined per-
ception of humor. When he came to these
United States as an amateur immigrant on his
way across the plains, he asked the name of a
river from a brakeman on the train; and when he
heard that the stream " was called the Susque-
hanna, the beauty of the name seemed part and
parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam
with divine fitness named the creatures, so this
word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the
fancy. That was the name, as no other could
be, for that shining river and desirable valley."

And then Stevenson breaks from his narrative
288

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

to sing the praises of our place-names. The
passage is long for quotation in a paper where
too much has been quoted already; and yet I
should be derelict to my duty if I did not tran-
scribe it here. Stevenson had lived among many
peoples, and he was far more cosmopolitan than
Matthew Arnold, and more willing, therefore, to
dwell on beauties than on blemishes. "None
can care for literature in itself," he begins, " who
do not take a special pleasure in the sound of
names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and
picturesque as the United States of America.
All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State
with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with San-
dusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of
red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is
own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis;
there they have their seat, translated names of
cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee
and Arkansas. . . . Old, red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrow-head under a steam-factory,
below Anglified New York. The names of the
States and Territories themselves form a chorus
of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware,
Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming,
Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few
poems with a nobler music for the ear; a song-
289

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

ful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall
arise from the western continent, his verse will
be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with
the names of states and cities that would strike
the fancy in a business circular."

As Campbell had utilized the innate beauty of
the word Wyoming, so Stevenson himself made
a ballad on the dreaded name of Ticonderoga;
and these are two of the proper names of mod-
ern America that sing themselves. But there is
nothing canorous in Anglified New York; there
is no sonority in its syllables; there is neither
dignity nor truth in its obvious meaning. It
might serve well enough as the address of a
steam-factory in a business circular; but it lacks
absolutely all that the name of a metropolis de-
mands. Stevenson thought that the new Homer
would joy in working into his strong lines the
beautiful nomenclature of America; but Wash-
ington Irving had the same anticipation, and it
forced him to declare that if New York " were to
share the fate of Troy itself, to suffer a ten years'
siege, and be sacked and plundered, no modern
Homer would ever be able to elevate the name
to epic dignity." Irving went so far as to wish
not only that New York city should be Manhat-
tan again, but that New York State should be
Ontario, the Hudson River the Mohegan, and the
United States themselves Appalachia. Edgar
290

ON THE POETRY OF PLACE-NAMES

Allan Poe, than whom none of our poets had a
keener perception of the beauty of sounds and
the fitness of words, approved of Appalachia as
the name of the whole country.

Perhaps we must wait yet a little while for

Appalachia and Ontario and the Mohegan; but

has not the time come to dig up that old red

arrow-head Manhattan, and fit it to a new shaft ?

('895)

291

XII
AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

[This paper is here reprinted from an earlier volume now out
of print.]

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

WHEN the author of the 'Cathedral' was
accosted by the wandering Englishmen
within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a
joke,

Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends.
The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,
Abolished in the truce of common speech
And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue.

In this common speech other Englishmen are
not always ready to acknowledge the full rights
of Lowell's countrymen. They would put us
ofT with but a younger brother's portion of the
mother-tongue, seeming somehow to think that
they are more closely related to the common
parent than we are. But Orlando, the younger
son of Sir Rowland du Bois, was no villain; and
tho we have broken with the fatherland, the
mother-tongue is none the less our heritage.
Indeed, we need not care whether the division is
per stirpes or per capita ; our share is not the less
in either case.

295

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

Beneath the impotent protests which certain
British newspapers are prone to make every
now and again against the "American language "
as a whole, and against the stray Americanism
which has happened last to invade England, there
is a tacit assumption that we Americans are outer
barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering
with something which belongs to the British
exclusively. And the outcry against the " Ameri-
can language " is not as shrill nor as piteous as
the shriek of horror with which certain of the
journals of London greet "American spelling," a
hideous monster which they feared was ready to
devour them as soon as the international copyright
bill should become law. In the midst of every dis-
cussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great
Britain, the bugbear of "American spelling"
reared its grisly head. The London Times de-
clared that English publishers would never put
any books into type in the United States because
the people of England would never tolerate the
peculiarities of orthography which prevailed in
American printing-offices. The St. James's Ga-
^ette promptly retorted that "already newspapers
in London are habitually using the ugliest forms
of American spelling, and these silly eccentricities
do not make the slightest difference in their cir-
culation." The Times and the St. James's Gazette
might differ as to the effect of the copyright act
296

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

on the profits of the printers of England, but
they agreed heartily as to the total depravity of
"American spelling." I think that any disinte-
rested foreigner who might chance to hear these
violent outcries would suppose that English
orthography was as the law of the Medes and
Persians, which altereth not; he would be justi-
fied in believing that the system of spelling now
in use in Great Britain was hallowed by the
Established Church, and in some way mysteri-
ously connected with the state religion.

Just what the British newspapers were afraid of
it is not easy to say, and it is difficult to declare
just what they mean when they talk of "Ameri-
can spelling." Probably they do not refer to the
improvements in orthography suggested by the
first great American — Benjamin Franklin. Pos-
sibly they do refer to the modifications in the
accepted spelling proposed by another American,
Noah Webster — not so great, and yet not to be
named slightingly by any one who knows how
fertile his labors have been for the good of the
whole country. Noah Webster, so his bio-
grapher, Mr. Scudder, tells us, "was one of the
first to carry a spirit of democracy into letters. . . .
Throughout his work one may detect a confi-
dence in the common sense of the people which
was as firm as Franklin's." But the innovations
of Webster were hesitating and often inconsistent;
297

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

and most of them have been abandoned by later
editors of Webster's American Dictionary of the
English Language.

What, then, do British writers mean when
they animadvert upon "American spelling"?
So far as I have been able to discover, the British
journalists object to certain minor labor-saving
improvements of American orthography, such as
the dropping of the h from almanack, the omis-
sion of one g from waggon, and the like; and
they protest with double force, with all the
strength that in them lies, against the substitu-
tion of a single / for a double / in such words as
traveller, against the omission of the u from such
words as honour, against the substitution of an
s for a c in such words as defence, and against
the transposing of the final two letters of such
words as theatre. The objection to "American
spelling" may lie deeper than I have here sug-
gested, and it may have a wider application ; but
I have done my best to state it fully and fairly as
I have deduced it from a painful perusal of many
columns of exacerbated British writing.

Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly
the extent of the British journalistic objections to
"American spelling," the unprejudiced reader
may be moved to ask: "Is this all ? Are these
few and slight and unimportant changes the
cause of this mighty commotion?" One may
298

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

agree with Sainte-Beuve in thinking that "or-
thography is the beginning of literature," with-
out discovering in these modifications from the
Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust.
And since I have quoted Sainte-Beuve once, I
venture to cite him again, and to take from the
same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion
that "if we write more correctly, let it be to ex-
press especiallyhonest feelings and just thoughts."

Feelings may be honest tho they are violent,
but irritation is not the best frame of mind for
just thinking. The tenacity with which some of
the newspapers of London are wont to defend
the accepted British orthography is perhaps due
rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell told
us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with
as fierce a flame as ever once theological hatred;
and any American who chances to note the force
and the fervor and the frequency of the objurga-
tions against " American spelling " in the columns
of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the
Athenceum, may find himself wondering as to
the date of the papal bull which declared the in-
fallibility of contemporary British orthography,
and as to the place where the council of the
church was held at which it was made an article
of faith.

The Saturday Review and the Atbenceum,
highly pitched as their voices are, yet are scarcely
299

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

shriller in their cry to arms against the possible
invasion of the sanctity of British orthography
by "American spelling" than is the London
Times, the solid representative of British thought,
the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet
the Times is not without orthographic eccentrici-
ties of its own, as Matthew Arnold took occa-
sion to point out. In his essay on the ' Literary
Influence of Academies,' he asserted that "every
one has noticed the way in which the Times
chooses to spell the word diocese; it always
spells it diocess, deriving it, I suppose, from
Zeus and census. . . . Imagine an educated
Frenchman indulging himself in an orthographi-
cal antic of this sort!"

When we read what is written in the Times
and the Saturday Review and the Athenceum,
sometimes in set articles on the subject, and
even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs
in the course of book-reviews, we wonder at
the vehemence of the feeling displayed. If we
did not know that ancient abuses are often de-
fended with more violence and with louder shouts
than inheritances of less doubtful worth, we
might suppose that the present spelling of the
English language was in a condition perfectly
satisfactory alike to scholar and to student.
Such, however, is not the case. The leading
philologists of Great Britain and of the United
300

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

States have repeatedly denounced English spell-
ing as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic,
Professor Max Muller at Oxford being no less em-
phatic than Professor Whitney at Yale. There
is now living no scholar of any repute who any
longer defends the ordinary orthography of the
English language.

The fact is that a little learning is quite as dan-
gerous a thing now as it was in Pope's day.
Those who are volubly denouncing "American
spelling " in the columns of British journals are
not students of the history of English speech;
they are not scholars in English ; in so far as they
know anything of the language, they are but
amateur philologists. As a well-known writer
on spelling reform once neatly remarked, "The
men who get their etymology by inspiration are
like the poor in that we have them always with
us." Altho few of them are as ignorant and
dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tor-
tured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a
ridiculously impossible Welsh rarebit, still the
most of their writing serves no good purpose.
Nor do we discover in these specimens of British
journalism that abundant urbanity which ety-
mology might lead us to look for in the writing
of inhabitants of so large a city as London.

Any one who takes the trouble to inform him-
self on the subject will soon discover that it is
301

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

chiefly the half-educated men who defend the con-
temporary orthography of the English language,
and who denounce the alleged "American spell-
ing" of center and honor. The uneducated
reader may wonder perchance what the g is
doing in sovereign; the half-educated reader dis-
cerns in the g a connecting-link between the
English sovereign and the Latin regno; the well-
educated reader knows that there is no philolo-
gical connection whatever between regno and
sovereign.

Most of those who write with ease in British
journals, deploring the prevalence of "American
spelling," have never carried their education so
far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which
prevents a man from expressing an opinion on
subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object
of education, it has been said, is to make a man
know what he knows, and also to know how
much he does not know. Despite the close
sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a
student of optics is not necessarily qualified to
express an opinion in esthetics; and on the other
hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of
science. Now literature is one of the arts, and
philology is a science. Altho men of letters
have to use words as the tools of their trade,
orthography is none the less a branch of philology,
and philology does not come by nature. Litera-
302

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

ture may even exist without writing, and there-
fore without spelling. Writing, indeed, has
no necessary connection with literature; still less
has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a
scientific student of language; he has no need to
be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty
for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast
of it is unseemly.

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of
the "American spelling" which the British jour-
nalists denounce. This "American spelling" is
less absurd than the British spelling only in so
far as it has varied therefrom. Even in these
variations there is abundant absurdity. Once
upon a time most words that now are spelled
with a final c had an added k. Even now both
British and American usage retains this k in ham-
mock, altho both British and Americans have
dropped the needless letter from bavoc; while the
British retain the k at the end of almanack and
the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson
was a reactionary in orthography as in politics;
and in his dictionary he wilfully put a final k
to words like optick, without being generally
followed by the publick — as he would have
spelled it. Music was then musick, altho, even
as late as Aubrey's time, it had been musique.
In our own day we are witnessing the very
gradual substitution of the logical technic for
303

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

the form originally imported from France —
technique.

I am inclined to think that technic is replacing
technique more rapidly — or should I say less
slowly? — in the United States than in Great
Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our
words and to make them our own, while the
British have rather a fondness for foreign phrases.
A London journalist recently held up to public
obloquy as an "ignorant Americanism" the
word program, altho he would have found it
set down in Professor Skeat's Etymological
Dictionary. "Programme was taken from the
French," so a recent writer reminds us, "and in
violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was
imported into English, we had already anagram,
cryptogram, diagram, epigram, etc." The logical
form program is not common even in America;
and British writers seem to prefer the French
form, as British speakers still give a French pro-
nunciation to charade, and to trait, which in
America have long since been accepted frankly as
English words.

Possibly it is idle to look for any logic in any-
thing which has to do with modern English
orthography on either side of the ocean. Per-
haps, however, there is less even than ordinary
logic in the British journalist's objection to the
so-called "American spelling " of meter ; for why
304

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

should any one insist on metre while unhesitatingly
accepting its compound diameter? Mr. John
Bellows, in the preface to his inestimable French-
English and English-French pocket dictionary,
one of the very best books of reference ever pub-
lished, informs us that "the act of Parliament
legalizing the use of the metric system in this
country [England] gives the words meter, liter,
gram, etc., spelled on the American plan." Per-
haps now that the sanction of law has been given
to this spelling, the final er will drive out the re
which has usurped its place. In one of the last
papers that he wrote, Lowell declared that "cen-
ter is no Americanism; it entered the language
in that shape, and kept it at least as late as Defoe."
"In the sixteenth and in the first half of the sev-
enteenth century," says Professor Lounsbury,
"while both ways of writing these words existed
side by side, the termination er is far more com-
mon than that in re. The first complete edition
of Shakspere's plays was published in 1623. In
that work sepulcber occurs thirteen times; it is
spelled eleven times with er. Scepter occurs
thirty-seven times; it is not once spelled with re,
but always with er. Center occurs twelve times,
and in nine instances out of the twelve it ends in
er" So we see that this so-called "American
spelling " is fully warranted by the history of the
English language. It is amusing to note how
305

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

often a wider and a deeper study of English will
reveal that what is suddenly denounced in Great
Britain as the very latest Americanism, whether
this be a variation in speech or in spelling, is
shown to be really a survival of a previous usage
of our language, and authorized by a host of
precedents.

Of course it is idle to kick against the pricks of
progress, and no doubt in due season Great
Britain and her colonial dependencies will be
content again to spell words that end in er as
Shakspere and Ben Jonson and Spenser spelled
them. But when we get so far toward the or-
thographic millennium that we all spell sepulcher,
the ghost of Thomas Campbell will groan within
the grave at the havoc then wrought in the final
line of 'Hohenlinden,' which will cease to end
with even the outward semblance of a rime to
the eye. We all know that

On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly;

and those of us who have persevered may re-
member that with one exception every fourth
line of Campbell's poem ends with a y, — the
words are rapidly, scenery, revelry, artillery,
canopy, and chivalry, — not rimes of surpassing
306

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

distinction, any of them, but perhaps passable
to a reader who will humor the final syllable.
The one exception is the final line of the poem-
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.

To no man's ear did sepulchre ever rime justly
with chivalry and canopy and artillery, altho
Campbell may have so contorted his vision that
he evoked the dim spook of a rime in his mind's
eye. A rime to the eye is a sorry thing at best,
and it is sorriest when it depends on an inaccu-
rate and evanescent orthography.

Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keeping in
and leaving out of the u in words like honor and
governor as he was in many other things; and
the makers of later dictionaries have departed
widely from his practice, those in Great Britain
still halting half-way, while those in the United
States have gone on to the bitter end. The il-
logic of the burly lexicographer is shown in his
omission of the u from exterior and posterior,
and his retention of it in the kindred words in-
teriour and anteriour ; this, indeed, seems like
wilful perversity, and justifies Hood's merry jest
about "Dr. Johnson's Contradictionary." The
half-way measures of later British lexicographers
are shown in their omission of the u from words
which Dr. Johnson spelled emperour, governour,
307

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

oratour, borrour, and dolour, while still retain-
ing it in favour and honour and a few others.

The reason for his disgust generally given by
the London man of letters who is annoyed by
the "American spelling" of honor and favor is
that these words are not derived directly from the
Latin, but indirectly through the French ; this is the
plea put forward by the late Archbishop Trench.
Even if this plea were pertinent, the application
of this theory is not consistent in current British
orthography, which prescribes the omission of
the u from error and emperor, and its retention
in colour and honour — altho all four words are
alike derived from the Latin through the French.
And this plea fails absolutely to account for the
u which the British insist on preserving in har-
bour and in neighbour, words not derived from
the Latin at all, whether directly or indirectly
through the French. An American may well
ask, "If the u in honour teaches etymology,
what does the u in harbour teach ? " There is
no doubt that the u in harbour teaches a false
etymology; and there is no doubt also that the
u in honour has been made to teach a false ety-
mology, for Trench's derivation of this final our
from the French eur is absurd, as the old French
was our, and sometimes ur, sometimes even or.
Pseudo-philology of this sort is no new thing;
Professor Max Muller noted that the Roman
308

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

prigs used to spell cena (to show their knowledge
of Greek), coena, as if the word were somehow
connected with HOIVT\.

Thus we see that the u in honour suggests a
false etymology; so does the ue in tongue, and
the g in sovereign, and the c in scent, and the s
in island, and the mp in comptroller, and the b
in rhyme ; and there are many more of our ordi-
nary orthographies which are quite as misleading
from a philological point of view. As the late
Professor Hadley mildly put it, "our common
spelling is often an untrustworthy guide to ety-
mology." But why should we expect or desire
spelling to be a guide to etymology ? If it is to
be a guide at all, we may fairly insist on its being
trustworthy; and so we cannot help thinking
scorn of those who insist on retaining a superflu-
ous u in harbour.

But why should orthography be made subser-
vient to etymology ? What have the two things
in common ? They exist for wholly different
ends, to be attained by wholly different means.
To bend either from its own work to the aid of
the other is to impair the utility of both. This
truth is recognized by all etymologists, and by
all students of language, altho it has not yet
found acceptance among men of letters, who are
rarely students of language in the scientific sense.
"It may be observed," Mr. Sweet declares,
309

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

"that it is mainly among the class of half-taught
dabblers in philology that etymological spelling
has found its supporters " ; and he goes on to
say that "all true philologists and philological
bodies have uniformly denounced it as a monstrous
absurdity both from a practical and a scientific point
of view." I should never dare to apply to the late
Archbishop Trench and the London journalists
who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr.
Sweet's "half-taught dabblers in philology";
but when a fellow-Briton uses it perhaps I may
venture to quote it without reproach.

As I have said before, the alleged "American
spelling " differs but very slightly from that
which prevails in England. A wandering New-
Yorker who rambles through London is able to
collect now and again evidences of orthographic
survivals which give him a sudden sense of being
in an older, country than his own. I have seen a
man whose home was near Gramercy Park stop
short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair,
and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of
paper across the glass door of a bar proclaiming
that CYDER was sold within. I have seen the
same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of
a chymist in the window of which corn-plaisters
were offered for sale. He wondered why a
British house should have storeys when an
American house has stories ; and he disliked in-
310

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

tensely the wanton e wherewith British printers
have recently disfigured form, which in the latest
London typographical vocabularies appears as
forme. This e in form is a gratuitous addition,
and therefore contrary to the trend of ortho-
graphic progress, which aims at the suppression
of all arbitrary and needless letters.

The so-called "American spelling" differs
from the spelling which obtains in England only
in so far as it has yielded a little more readily to
the forces which make for progress, for uniform-
ity, for logic, for common sense. But just how
fortuitous and chaotic the condition of English
spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and
in the United States no man knows who has not
taken the trouble to investigate for himself. In
England, the reactionary orthography of Samuel
Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In Amer-
ica, the revolutionary orthography of Noah
Webster has been receded from even by his own
inheritors. There is no standard, no authority,
not even that of a powerful, resolute, and domi-
neering personality.

Perhaps the attitude of philologists toward
the present spelling of the English language, and
their opinion of those who are up in arms in de-
fense of it, have never been more tersely stated
than in Professor Lounsbury's most admirable
' Studies in Chaucer,' a work which I should term
3"

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps
give a false impression of a book wherein the re-
sults of learning are set forth with the most adroit
literary art, and with an uninsistent but omni-
present humor, which is a constant delight to the
reader:

"There is certainly nothing more contempti-
ble than our present spelling, unless it be the
reasons usually given for clinging to it. The
divorce which has unfortunately almost always
existed between English letters and English
scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed ex-
hibition of itself than in the comments which
men of real literary ability make upon proposals
to change or modify the cast-iron framework in
which our words are now clothed. On one side
there is an absolute agreement of view on the
part of those who are authorized by their know-
ledge of the subject to pronounce an opinion.
These are well aware that the present ortho-
graphy hides the history of the word instead of
revealing it; that it is a stumbling-block in the
way of derivation or of pronunciation instead of
a guide to it; that it is not in any sense a growth
or development, but a mechanical malformation,
which owes its existence to the ignorance of
early printers and the necessity of consulting the
convenience of printing-offices. This consensus
of scholars makes the slightest possible impres-
312

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

sion upon men of letters throughout the whole
great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly
one of them who is not calmly confident of the
superiority of his opinion to that of the most
famous special students who have spent years in
examining the subject. There is hardly one of
them who does not fancy he is manifesting a
noble conservatism by holding fast to some spell-
ing peculiarly absurd, and thereby maintaining a
bulwark against the ruin of the tongue. There
is hardly one of them who has any hesitation in
discussing the question in its entirety, while
every word he utters shows that he does not
understand even its elementary principles. There
would be something thoroughly comic in turn-
ing into a fierce international dispute the question
of spelling honor without the u, were it not for
the depression which every student of the lan-
guage cannot well help feeling in contemplating
the hopeless abysmal ignorance of the history of
the tongue which any educated man must first
possess in order to become excited over the sub-
ject at all." ('Studies in Chaucer,' vol. iii., pp.
265-267.)

Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing.
Sometimes it is going further and further away
from the orthography; for example, either and
neither are getting more and more to have in
their first syllable the long / sound instead of the
3'3

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

long e sound which they had once. Sometimes
it is being modified to agree with the orthogra-
phy; for example, the older pronunciations of
again to rime with men, and of been to rime
with pin, in which I was carefully trained as a
boy, seem to me to be giving way before a pro-
nunciation in exact accord with the spelling,
again to rime with pain, and been to rime
with seen. These two illustrations are from the
necessarily circumscribed experience of a single
observer, and the observation of others may not
bear me out in my opinion; but tho the illustra-
tions fall to the ground, the main assertion, that
pronunciation is changing, is indisputable.

No doubt the change is less rapid than it was
before the invention of printing; far less rapid
than it was before the days of the public school
and of the morning newspaper. There are vari-
ations of pronunciation in different parts of the
United States and of Great Britain, as there are
variations of vocabulary; but in the future there
will be a constantly increasing tendency for
these variations to disappear. There are irre-
sistible forces making for uniformity — forces
which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Ger-
many, Provencal in France, Romansch in Swit-
zerland. There is a desire to see a standard set
up to which all may strive to conform. In
France a standard of pronunciation is found at
3'4

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING

the Comedie Franchise; and in Germany, what
is almost a standard of vocabulary has been set
in what is now known as Bilbnen-Deutscb.

In France the Academy was constituted chiefly
to be a guardian of the language; and the
Academy, properly conservative as it needs must
be, is engaged in a slow reform of French ortho-
graphy, yielding to the popular demand decorously
and judiciously. By official action, also, the
orthography of German has been simplified and
made more logical and brought into closer rela-
tion with modern pronunciation. Even more
thorough reforms have been carried through in
Italy, in Spain, and in Holland. Yet neither
French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or
Dutch, stood half as much in need of the broom
of reform as English, for in no one of these lan-
guages were there so many dark corners which
needed cleaning out ; in no one of them the differ-
ence between orthography and pronunciation so
wide; and in no one of them was the accepted
spelling debased by numberless false etymologies.

Beyond all question, what is needed on both
sides of the Atlantic, in the United States as
well as in Great Britain, is a conviction that the
existing orthography of English is not sacred,
and that to tamper with it is not high treason.
What is needed is the consciousness that neither
Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his

AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING"

dictionary under direct inspiration. What is
needed is an awakening to the fact that our
spelling, so far from being immaculate at its best,
is, at its best, hardly less absurd than the hap-
hazard, rule-of-thumb, funnily phonetic spelling
of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings. What is
needed is anything which will break up the
lethargy of satisfaction with the accepted ortho-
graphy, and help to open the eyes of readers and
writers to the stupidity of the present system and
tend to make them discontented with it.
(,892)

316

XIII

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH
SPELLING

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH
SPELLING

IN a communication to a London review Pro-
fessor W. W. Skeat remarked that " it is no-
torious that all the leading philologists of Europe,
during the last quarter of a century, have unani-
mously condemned the present chaotic spelling
of the English language, and have received on
the part of the public generally, and of the most
blatant and ignorant among the self-constituted
critics, nothing but abusive ridicule, which is
meant to be scathing, but is harmless from its
silliness " ; and it cannot be denied that the ortho-
graphic simplifications which the leading phi-
lologists of Great Britain and the United States
are advocating have not yet been widely adopted.
In an aggressive article an American essayist has
sought to explain this by the assertion that pho-
netic-reform " is hopelessly, unspeakably, sicken-
ingly vulgar; and this is an eternal reason why
men and women of taste, refinement, and dis-
crimination will reject it with a shudder of dis-
319

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

gust." Satisfactory as this explanation may seem
to the essayist, I have a certain difficulty in ac-
cepting it myself, since I find on the list of the
vice-presidents of the Orthographic Union the
names of Mr. Howells, of Colonel Higginson, of
Dr. Eggleston, of Professor Lounsbury, and of
President White; and even if I was willing to
admit that these gentlemen were all of them
lacking in taste, refinement, and discrimination,
I still could not agree with the aggressive essay-
ist so long as my own name was on the same
list.

What strikes me as a better explanation is that
given by the president of the Orthographic
Union, Mr. Benjamin E. Smith, who has sug-
gested that phonetic-reformers have asked too
much, and so have received too little; they have
demanded an immediate and radical change, and
as a result they have frightened away all but the
most resolute radicals; they have failed to reckon
with the immense conservatism which gives sta-
bility to all the institutions of the English-
speaking race. As Mr. Smith puts it, " there is a
deep-rooted feeling that the existing printed form
is not only a symbol but the most fitting symbol
for our mother-tongue, and that a radical change
must impair for us the beauty and spiritual effec-
tiveness of that which it symbolizes."

A part of the unreadiness of the public to listen
320

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

to the advocates of phonetic-reform has been due
also to the general consciousness that pronuncia-
tion is not fixed but very variable indeed, being
absolutely alike in no two places where English
is spoken, and perhaps in no two persons who
speak English. The humorous poet has shown
to us how the little word vase once served as a
shibboleth to reveal the homes of each of the four
young ladies who came severally from New
York and Boston and Philadelphia and Kalama-
zoo. The difference between the pronunciation
of New York and Boston is not so marked as
that between London and Edinburgh— or as that
between New York and London. And the pro-
nunciation of to-day is not that of to-morrow ; it
is constantly being modified, sometimes by im-
perceptible degrees and sometimes by a sudden
change like the arbitrary substitution of aitberand
naither for eether and neetber. Now, if pronunci-
ation is not uniform in any two persons, in any
two places, at any two periods, the wayfaring
man is not to blame if he is in doubt, first, as to
the possibility of a uniform phonetic spelling,
and, second, as to its permanence even if it was
once to be attained.

A glance down the history of English ortho-
graphy discloses the fact that, however chaotic our
spelling may seem to be now or may seem to
have been in Shakspere's day, it is and it always
321

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

has been striving ineffectively to be phonetic.
Always the attempt has been to use the letters of
the word to represent its sounds. From the be-
ginning there has been an unceasing struggle to
keep the orthography as phonetic as might be.
This continuous striving toward exactness of
sound-reproduction has never been radical or vio-
lent; it has always been halting and half-hearted:
but it has been constant, and it has accomplished
marvels in the course of the centuries. The
most that we can hope to do is to help along
this good work, to hasten this inevitable but be-
lated progress, to make the transitions as easy as
possible, and to smooth the way so that the
needful improvements may follow one another as
swiftly as shall be possible. We must remem-
ber that a half-loaf is better than no bread ; and
we must remind ourselves frequently that the
greatest statesmen have been opportunists, know-
ing what they wanted, but taking what they
could get.

We have now to face the fact that in no lan-
guage is a sudden and far-reaching reform in
spelling ever likely to be attained; and in none is
it less likely than in English. The history of the
peoples who use our tongue on both sides of the
Atlantic proves that they belong to a stock which
is wont to make haste slowly, to take one step at
a time, and never to allow itself to be overmas-
322

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

tered by mere logic. By a series of gradations
almost invisible the loose confederacy of 1776
developed into the firm union of 1861, which was
glad to grant to Abraham Lincoln a power broader
than that wielded by any dictator. Even the
abolition of the corn-laws and the adoption of
free-trade in Great Britain, sudden as it may seem,
was only the final result of a long series of
events.

The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling
being impracticable,— even if it was altogether
desirable,— the efforts of those who are dissatis-
fied with the prevailing orthography of our lan-
guage had best be directed toward the perfectly
practical end of getting our improvement on the
instalment plan. We must seek now to have
only the most flagrant absurdities corrected. We
must be satisfied to advance little by little. We
must begin by showing that there is nothing
sacrosanct about the present spelling either in
Great Britain or in the United States. We must
make it clear to all who are willing to listen— and
it is our duty to be persuasive always and never
dogmatic— that the effort of the English language
to rid itself of orthographic anomalies is almost
as old as the language itself. We must show
those who insist on leaving the present spelling
undisturbed that in taking this attitude they are
setting themselves in opposition to the past,

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

which they pretend to respect. The average man
is open to conviction if you do not try to brow-
beat him into adopting your beliefs; and he can
be induced to accept improvements, one at a
time, if he has it made plain to him that each of
these is but one in a series unrolling itself since
Chaucer. We must convince the average man
that we want merely to continue the good work
of our forefathers, and that the real innovators are
those who maintain the absolute inviolability of
our present spelling.

Even the vehement essayist from whom I have
quoted already, and who is the boldest of later
opponents of phonetic-reform, is vehement chiefly
against the various schemes of wholesale revi-
sion. He himself refuses to make any modifi-
cation,—except to revert now and again to a
medievalism \\kepadagogue,— but he knows the
history of language too well not to be forced to
admit that a simplification of some sort is certain
to be achieved in the future. " The written forms
of English words will change in time, as the lan-
guage itself will change," he confesses; "it will
change in its vocabulary, in its idioms, in its
pronunciation, and perhaps to some extent in its
structural form. For change is the one essential
and inevitable phenomenon of a living language,
as it is of any living organism ; and with these
changes, slow and silent and unconscious, will
324

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

come a change in the orthography." As we read
this admirable statement we cannot but wonder
why a writer who understands so well the con-
ditions of linguistic growth should wish to bind
his own language in the cast-iron bonds of an
outworn orthography. We may wonder also
why he is not consistent in his own practice, and
why he does not spell phenomenon as Macaulay
did only threescore and ten years ago.

Underneath the American essayist's objection
to any orthographic simplification in English, and
underneath the plaintive protests of certain British
men of letters against "American spelling," so
called, lies the assumption that there is at the
present moment a "regular" spelling, which has
existed time out of mind and which the tasteless
reformers wish to destroy. For this assumption
there is no warrant whatever. The orthography
of our language has never been stable; it has
always been fluctuating; and no authority has
ever been given to anybody to lay down laws for
its regulation. For a convention to have validity
it must have won general acceptance at some
period; and the history of English shows that
there has never been any such common agree-
ment, expressed or implied, in regard to English
spelling. Some of the unphonetic forms which
are most vigorously defended, as hallowed by
custom and by sentiment, are comparatively re-

325

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

cent; and others which seem as sacred have had
foisted into them needless letters conveying false
impressions about their origins.

That there is no theory or practice of English
orthography universally accepted to-day is ob-
vious to all who may take the trouble to observe
for themselves. The spelling adopted by the
' Century Magazine ' is different from that to be
found in 'Harper's Magazine'; and this differs
again from that insisted upon in the pages','of the
'Bookman.' The 'Century' has gone a little in
advance of American spelling generally, as seen in
' Harper's,' and the ' Bookman ' is intentionally re-
actionary. In the United States orthography is
in a healthier state of instability than it is in
Great Britain, where there is a closer approxima-
tion to a deadening uniformity; but even in Lon-
don and Edinburgh those who are on the watch
can discover many a divergence from the strict
letter of the doctrine of orthographic rigidity.

And just as there is no system of English spell-
ing tacitly agreed on by all men of education
usingthe English language at present, so there was
also no system of English spelling consistently
and continually used by our ancestors in the past.
The orthography of Matthew Arnold differs a
little, altho not much, from the orthography of
Macaulay; and that in turn a little from the or-
thography of Johnson. In like manner the spell-
326

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

ing of Dryden is very different from the spelling
of Spenser, and the spelling of Spenser is very
different from the spelling of Chaucer. At no
time in the long unrolling of English literature
from Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agree-
ment among those who used the language as to
any precise way in which its words should be
spelled or even as to any theory which should
govern particular instances. The history of Eng-
lish orthography is a record still incomplete of
incessant variation; and a study of it shows
plainly how there have been changes in every
generation, some of them logical and some of
them arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifica-
tions, and some of them gross perversities.

Thus we see that those who defend any exist-
ing orthography, which they choose to regard as
" regular " and outside of which they affect to
behold only vulgar aberration, are setting them-
selves against the example left us by our fore-
fathers. We see also that those of us who are
striving to modify our spelling in moderation are
doing exactly what has been done by every gen-
eration that preceded us. To repeat in other
words what I have said already, there is not any
system of English orthography which is sup-
ported by a universal convention to-day or which
has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity.

The opponents of simplification have been
327

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

greatly aided by the general acceptance of this
assumption of theirs that the advocates of sim-
plification wanted to remove ancient landmarks,
to break with the past, to introduce endless in-
novations. The best part of their case will fall
to the ground when it is generally understood
that the orthography of our language has never
been fixed for a decad at a time. And this un-
derstanding of the real facts of the situation is
likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by
the wide circulation of many recent reprints of
the texts of the great authors of the past in the
exact spelling of the original edition. So long as
we were in the habit of seeing the works of
Shakspere and Steele, of Scott, Thackeray, and
Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not
uniform exactly, did not vary widely, we were
sorely tempted to say that the spelling which
was good enough for them is good enough for
us and for our children.

But when we have in our hands the works
of those great writers as they were originally
printed, and when we are forced to remark that
they spell in no wise alike one to the other; and
when we discover that such uniformity of or-
thography they may have seemed to have was
due, not to any theory of the authors themselves,
but merely to the practice of the modern print-
ing-offices and proof-readers—when these things
328

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

are brought home to us, any superstitious reve-
rence bids fair to vanish which we may have had
for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere's
and Steele's and Scott's and Thackeray's and
Hawthorne's.

And one indirect result of this scholarly desire
to get as near as may be to the masterpiece as the
author himself presented it to the world, is that
men of letters and lovers of literature— two
classes hitherto strangely ignorant of the history
of the English language and of the constant
changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its
syntax, and in its orthography— will at least have
the chance to acquire information at first hand.
Their resistance to simplification ought to be-
come less irreconcilable when the men of letters,
now its chief opponents, have discovered for
themselves that there is not now and never has
been any stable system of orthography. When
they really grasp the fact that there has been no
permanency in the past and that there is no uni-
formity in the present, perhaps they will show
themselves less unwilling to take the next step
forward. Just now they are rather like the
Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted
to uninvent printing and to undiscover America.

The most powerful single influence in fixing
the present absurd spelling of our language was
undoubtedly Johnson's Dictionary, published in
329

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

the middle of the eighteenth century. We can-
not but respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson
and his indomitable energy; but the making of
an English dictionary was not the task for which
his previous studies had preeminently fitted him.
Probably he would have succeeded better with a
Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something
characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of
the burly doctor's spending his toil in compiling
a list of the words in a language the use of which
he held to be disgraceful in a friend's epitaph.
Johnson was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be
found to record English orthography, a task calling
for a science the existence of which he did not
even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he
lacked absolutely. In all matters of taste he was
an elephantine pachyderm; and there are only a
few of his principles of criticism which are not
now disestablished.

Any one whose reading is at all varied and who
strays outside of books printed within the past
quarter-century, can find abundant evidence of
the former chaos of English orthography. In
Moxon's ' Mechanic Exercises,' published in 1683,
for example, we read that " how well other For-
rain languages are Corrected by the Author, we
may perceive by the English that is Printed in
Forrain Countries " ; and this shows us that the
phonetic form forrain is older than the unpho-
330

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

netic foreign. In the 'Spectator' (No. 510)
Steele wrote landskip where we should now
write landscape ; in Addison's criticism of ' Para-
dise Lost/ contributed to the same periodical, we
find critich, beroick, and epich ; and whether
Steele or Addison held the pen, ribbons were then
always ribands.

On the title-page of the first edition of ' Rob-
inson Crusoe,' published in 1719, we are told that
we can read within " an account of how he was
at last strangely delivered by Pyrates." Fielding,
in the ' Champion ' in 1740, tells us that "dinner
soon follow'd, being a gammon of bacon and
some chickens, with a most excellent app\e-pye."
In the same essay Fielding wrote that " our friends
exprest great pleasure at our drinking"; and in
' Tom Jones ' he wrote profest for professed (as
we should now spell it). Here we discover that
the nineteenth century is sometimes more back-
ward than the eighteenth, profest and exprest
being the very spellings which many are now
advocating. Fielding also wrote Salique where
we should now write Salic, as Wotton had writ-
ten Dorique for Doric in a letter to Milton ; and
here the advantage is with us. So it is also in
our spelling of the italicized word in the playbill
of the third night of Mr. Cooper's engagement at
the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796:
" Smoaking in the Theatre Prohibited."
33'

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

Attention has already been called to Macaulay's
phenomenon (and to Professor Peck's peda-
gogue). The abolition of the digraph has been
a protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a
translation of Schlegel's ' Lectures on Dramatic
Literature,' published in London early in the
nineteenth century, I have found ccra for era ; and
in the eighteenth century economics was oeconom-
ics. Esthetic has not yet quite expelled cesthetic,
altho anesthetic seems now fairly established.

The Greek ph is also a stumbling-block. We
write phantom on the one hand and fancy on the
other, and either phantasy or fantasy; yet all
these words are derived from the same Greek
root. Probably phancy would seem as absurd to
most of us as fantotn. Yet fantasy has only
recently begun to get the better of phantasy. The
Italians are bolder than we are, for they have not
hesitated to write filosofia and fotografia. To
most of us fotografer, as we read it on a sign in
Union Square, seems truly outlandish; and yet if
our great-grandfathers were willing to accept
fancy there is no logical reason why our great-
grandchildren may not accept fotografy. There
is no longer any logical basis for opposition on
the ground of scholarship. Indeed, the scholarly
opposition to these orthographic simplifications
is not unlike the opposition in Germany to the
adoption of the Roman alphabet by those who
332

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

cling to the old Gothic letter on the ground that
it is more German, altho it is in reality only
a medieval corruption of the Roman letter. With
those who speak German, as with those who
speak English, the chief obstacle to the accom-
plishment of proposed improvements in writing
the language is to be found in the general igno-
rance of its history— or perhaps rather in that
conceited half-knowledge which is always more
dangerous than modest ignorance.

To diffuse accurate information about the his-
tory of English orthography is the most pressing
and immediate duty now before those of us who
wish to see our spelling simplified. We must
keep reminding those we wish to convince that
we want their aid in helping along the movement
which has in the past changed musique to music,
riband to ribbon, phantasy to fantasy, cera to
era, phenomenon to phenomenon, and which in
the present is changing catalogue to catalog, ces-
tbetic to esthetic, programme to program, technique
to technic.

There never has been any "regular" spelling
accepted by everybody, or any system of or-
thography sustained by universal convention. To
assume that there is anything of the sort is
adroitly to beg the very question at issue. There
are always in English many words the spelling of
which is not finally fixed; and these doubtful
333

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

orthographies Professor Peck, for example, would
decide in one way and Professor Skeat would de-
cide in another. The most of Professor Peck's
decisions would result in conforming his spelling
to that which obtains in the printing-office of the
London Times, but in several cases he would
exercise the right of private judgment, spelling
pedagogue, for example, and Vergil. But if he
chooses to exercise the right of private judgment,
he is estopped from denying this right also to
Professor Skeat; and the moment either of them
sets up the personal equation as a guide, all pre-
tense of an accepted system vanishes.

It is our duty also to draw attention to the
fact that it is a wholesome thing that there is
no accepted system and that the orthography of
our language should be free to modify itself in
the future as it has in the past. It is this absence
of system which gives fluidity and flexibility and
the faculty of adaptation to changing conditions.
The Chief Justice of England, when he addressed
the American Bar Association, recorded his pro-
test against a cast-iron code in law as tending to
hinder legal development; and our language, like
our law, must beware lest it lose its power of
conforming to the needs of our people as these
may be unexpectedly developed. Just as the
conservatism of the English-speaking stock makes
it highly improbable that any sweeping change in
334

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

our spelling will ever be made, so the enterprise
of the English-speaking stock, its energy and its
common sense, make it highly improbable that
any system will long endure which cramps and
confines and prevents progress and simplification.

Finally, we must all of us bend our energies
to combating the notion that, as Mr. Smith
has put it, " the existing printed form is not
only a symbol but the most fitting symbol of
our mother-tongue." There is an almost super-
stitious veneration felt by most of us for the
spellings we learnt at school; they seem to us
sanctified by antiquity; and perhaps even an in-
quiry into the history of the language is not
always enough to disestablish this reverence for
false gods. Yet knowledge helps to free us from
servitude to idols; and when we are told that the
so-called "accepted spelling" has "dignity, "we
may ask ourselves what dignity there can be in
the spelling of harbour with an inserted u which
is not pronounced, which has been thrust in com-
paratively recently, and which is etymologically
misleading.

In his effective answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer's
argument against the metric system, President
T. C. Mendenhall remarked that " ignorant preju-
dice " is not so dangerous an obstacle to human
progress, nor as common, as what may be called
"intelligent prejudice," meaning thereby "an

335

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

obstinate conservatism which makes people cling
to what is or has been, merely because it is or
has been, not being willing to take the trouble to
do better, because already doing well, all the
while knowing that doing better is not only the
easier, but is more in harmony with existing con-
ditions. Such conservatism is highly developed
among English-speaking people on both sides of
the Atlantic." It is just such conservatism as this
that those of us will have to overcome who wish
to see our English orthography continue its life-
long efforts toward simplification.

To understand how unfortunate for the cause
of progress it is when its leaders miscalculate
the popular inertia and when they are therefore
moved to demand more than seems reasonable
to the people as a whole, we have only to con-
sider the result of the joint action, in 1883, of the
Philological Society of England and of the Ameri-
can Philological Association, in consequence of
which certain rules were prepared to simplify
our spelling. Here was a union of indisputable
authorities in favor of an amended orthography;
but unfortunately the changes suggested were
both many and various. They were too various
to please any but the most resolute radicals;
and they were too many to be remembered
readily by the great majority of every-day folk
taking no particular interest in the subject. They
336

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

included theater, honor, advertise, catalog; and
had they not included anything else, or had they
included only a very few similar simplifications,
these spellings might have won acceptance in the
past score of years, even in Great Britain ; the same
authorities would now be in a position to make
a few further suggestions equally easy to re-
member, with a fair hope that these would
establish themselves in turn.

Owing to this attempt to do too much all at
once, the joint action of the two great philologi-
cal organizations came to naught. Such effect as
it had was indirect at best. It may have been
the exciting cause of the so-called " Printers'
Rules," which were approved and recommended
by many of the leading typographers of the
United States a few years later. These printers'
rules were few and obvious. They suggested
catalog, program, epaulet, esthetic— a\\ of which
have become more familiar of late. They sug-
gested further opposit, hypocrit, etc., and also
fotograf, fonetic, etc. ; and these simplifications
have not yet been adopted widely enough to pre-
vent the words thus emended from seeming a
little strange to all those who had paid no spe-
cial attention to the subject. And these un-
interested outsiders are the very people who are
to be converted. To them and to them only
must all argument be addressed. We may rest
337

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

assured that we have slight chance of bringing
over to our side any of those who have actually
enlisted against us. We must not count on de-
sertions from the enemy; we must enroll the
neutrals at every opportunity.

Probably the most important action yet taken
in regard to our orthography was that of the
National Educational Association in formally
adopting for use in all its official publications
twelve simplified spellings— program, tho, altho,
tboro, tborofare, thru, tbruout, catalog, prolog,
decalog, demagog, pedagog. These simplified
spellings were immediately adopted in the ' Edu-
cational Review ' and in other periodicals edited
by members of the association. They are very
likely to appear with increasing frequency in the
school-books which members may hereafter pre-
pare; and any simplified spelling which once gets
itself into a school-book is pretty sure to hold its
own in the future. After an interval of ten or
fifteen years the National Educational Association
will be in a position to consider the situation
again; and it may then decide that these twelve
words have established themselves in their new
form sufficiently widely and firmly to make it
probable that the association could put forward
another list of a dozen more simplified spellings
with a reasonable certainty that those also will be
accepted.

338

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

The United States government appointed a
board to decide on a uniform orthography for
geographical names; and the recommendations
of this body were generally in the direction of
increased simplicity— Bert ng Straits, for example.
The spellings thus officially adopted by the na-
tional government were at once accepted by the
chief publishers of school text-books. And these
makers of school-books also follow the rules
formulated by a committee of the American As-
sociation for the Advancement of Science ap-
pointed to bring about uniformity in the spelling
and pronunciation of chemical terms. Among
the rules formulated by the committee and
adopted by the association were two which
dropped a terminal e from certain chemical terms
entering into more general use. Thus the men
of science now write oxid, iodid, cblorid, etc.,
and quinin, morphin, anilin, etc., altho the gen-
eral public has not relinquished the earlier ortho-
graphy, oxide and quinine. Even the word
toxin, which came into being since the adoption
of these rules by the associated scientists, is
sometimes to be seen in newspapers as toxine.

Thus we see that there is progress all along the
line; it may seem very slow, like that of a gla-
cier, but it is as certain as it is irresistible. There
is no call for any of us to be disheartened by
the prospect. We may, indeed, each of us do
339

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING

what little we can severally toward hastening the
result. We can form the habit of using in our
daily writing such simplified spellings as will not
seem affected or freakish, keeping ourselves al-
ways in the forefront of the movement, but never
going very far in advance of the main body. We
must not make a fad of orthographic ameliora-
tion, nor must we devote to it a disproportionate
share of our activity— since we know that there
are other reforms as pressing as this and even
more important. But we can hold ourselves
ready always to lend a hand to help along the
cause; and we can show our willingness always
to stand up and be counted in its favor.
(1898-1901)

340

XIV

AMERICANISM-AN ATTEMPT
AT A DEFINITION

AMERICANISM-AN ATTEMPT
AT A DEFINITION

THERE are many words in circulation among
us which we understand fairly well, which
we use ourselves, and which we should, how-
ever, find it difficult to define. I think that
Americanism is one of these words ; and I think
also it is well for us to inquire into the exact
meaning of this word, which is often most care-
lessly employed. More than once of late have we
heard a public man praised for his " aggressive
Americanism," and occasionally we have seen a
man of letters denounced for his " lack of Ameri-
canism." Now what does the word really mean
when it is thus used ?

It means, first of all, a love for this country of
ours, an appreciation of the institutions of this
nation, a pride in the history of this people to
which we belong. And to this extent Ameri-
canism is simply another word for patriotism.
But it means also, I think, more than this: it
means a frank acceptance of the principles which
343

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

underlie our government here in the United
States. It means, therefore, a faith in our fellow-
man, a belief in liberty and in equality. It im-
plies, further, so it seems to me, a confidence in
the future of this country, a confidence in its
destiny, a buoyant hopefulness that the right
will surely prevail.

In so far as Americanism is merely patriotism,
it is a very good thing. The man who does not
think his own country the finest in the world is
either a pretty poor sort of a man or else he has
a pretty poor sort of a country. If any people
have not patriotism enough to make them willing
to die that the nation may live, then that people
will soon be pushed aside in the struggle of life,
and that nation will be trampled upon and
crushed; probably it will be conquered and ab-
sorbed by some race of a stronger fiber and of a
sterner stock. Perhaps it is difficult to declare
precisely which is the more pernicious citizen of
a republic when there is danger of war with
another nation— the man who wants to fight,
right or wrong, or the man who does not want
to fight, right or wrong; the hot-headed fellow
who would plunge the country into a deadly
struggle without first exhausting every possible
chance to obtain an honorable peace, or the cold-
blooded person who would willingly give up
anything and everything, including honor itself,
344

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

sooner than risk the loss of money which every
war surely entails. " My country, right or
wrong," is a good motto only when we add to
it, "and if she is in the wrong, I '11 help to put
her in the right." To shrink absolutely from a
fight where honor is really at stake, this is the
act of a coward. To rush violently into a quar-
rel when war can be avoided without the sacri-
fice of things dearer than life, this is the act of a
fool.

True patriotism is quiet, simple, dignified; it
is not blatant, verbose, vociferous. The noisy
shriekers who go about with a chip on their
shoulders and cry aloud for war upon the slight-
est provocation belong to the class contemptu-
ously known as "Jingoes." They may be pa-
triotic,—and as a fact they often are,— but their
patriotism is too frothy, too hysteric, too unin-
telligent, to inspire confidence. True patriotism
is not swift to resent an insult; on the contrary,
it is slow to take offense, slow to believe that an
insult could have been intended. True patriot-
ism, believing fully in the honesty of its own
acts, assumes also that others are acting with the
same honesty. True patriotism, having a solid
pride in the power and resources of our country,
doubts always the likelihood of any other nation
being willing carelessly to arouse our enmity.

In so far, therefore, as Americanism is merely

345

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

patriotism it is a very good thing, as I have tried
to point out. But Americanism is something
more than patriotism. It calls not only for love of
our common country, but also for respect for our
fellow-man. It implies an actual acceptance of
equality as a fact. It means a willingness always
to act on the theory, not that " I 'm as good as the
other man," but that " the other man is as good as
I am." It means leveling up rather than leveling
down. It means a regard for law, and a desire to
gain our wishes and to advance our ideas always
decently and in order, and with deference to the
wishes and the ideas of others. It leads a man
always to acknowledge the good faith of those
with whom he is contending, whether the con-
test is one of sport or of politics. It prevents a
man from declaring, or even from thinking, that
all the right is on his side, and that all the hon-
est people in the country are necessarily of his
opinion.

And, further, it seems to me that true Ameri-
canism has faith and hope. It believes that the
world is getting better, if not year by year, at
least century by century; and it believes also that
in this steady improvement of the condition of
mankind these United States are destined to do
their full share. It holds that, bad as many
things may seem to be to-day, they were worse
yesterday, and they will be better to-morrow.
346

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

However dark the outlook for any given cause
may be at any moment, the man imbued with
the true spirit of Americanism never abandons
hope and never relaxes effort; he feels sure that
everything comes to him who waits. He knows
that all reforms are inevitable in the long run ;
and that if they do not finally establish them-
selves it is because they are not really reforms,
tho for a time they may have seemed to be.

And a knowledge of the history of the American
people will supply ample reasons for this faith
in the future. The sin of negro-slavery never
seemed to be more secure from overthrow than
it did in the ten years before it was finally abol-
ished. A study of the political methods of the
past will show that there has been immense im-
provement in many respects; and it is perhaps in
our political methods that we Americans are most
open to censure. That there was no deteriora-
tion of the moral stamina of the whole people
during the first century of the American republic
any student can make sure of by comparing the
spirit which animated the inhabitants of the
thirteen colonies during the Revolution with
the spirit which animated the population of the
northern states (and of the southern no less)
during the civil war. We are accustomed to sing
the praises of our grandfathers who won our
independence, and very properly; but our grand-
347

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

children will have also to sing the praises of our
fathers who stood up against one another for
four years of the hardest fighting the world has
ever seen, bearing the burdens of a protracted
struggle with an uncomplaining cheerfulness
which was not a characteristic of the earlier war.

True Americanism is sturdy but modest. It is
as far removed from "Jingoism" in times of
trouble as it is from " Spread-Eagleism " in times
of peace. It is neither vainglorious nor boastful.
It knows that the world was not created in 1492,
and that July 4, 1776, is not the most important
date in the whole history of mankind. It does
not overestimate the contribution which America
has made to the rest of the world, nor does it
underestimate this contribution. True American-
ism, as I have said, has a pride in the past of this
great country of ours, and a faith in the future ;
but none the less it is not so foolish as to think
that all is perfection on this side of the Atlantic,
and that all is imperfection on the other side.

It knows that some things are better here than
anywhere else in the world, that some things are
no better, and that some things are not so good
in America as they are in Europe. For example,
probably the institutions of the nation fit the
needs of the population with less friction here in
the United States than in any other country in
the world. But probably, also, there is no other
348

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

one of the great nations of the world in which
the government of the large cities is so wasteful
and so negligent.

True Americanism recognizes the fact that
America is the heir of the ages, and that it is for
us to profit as best we can by the experience of
Europe, not copying servilely what has been
successful in the old world, but modifying
what we borrow in accord with our own needs
and our own conditions. It knows, and it has
no hesitation in declaring, that we must always
be the judges ourselves as to whether or not we
shall follow the example of Europe. Many times
we have refused to walk in the path of European
precedent, preferring very properly to blaze out
a track for ourselves. More often than not this
independence was wise, but now and again it
was unwise.

Finally, one more quality of true Americanism
must be pointed out. It is not sectional. It does
not dislike an idea, a man, or a political party
because that idea, that man, or that party comes
from a certain part of the country. It permits a
man to have a healthy pride in being a son of
Virginia, a citizen of New York, a native of Mas-
sachusetts, but only on condition that he has a
pride still stronger that he is an American, a citi-
zen of the United States. True Americanism is
never sectional. It knows no north and no
349

AMERICANISM — AN ATTEMPT AT A DEFINITION

south, no east and no west. And as it has no
sectional likes and dislikes, so it has no interna-
tional likes and dislikes. It never puts itself in
the attitude of the Englishman who said, " I 've
no prejudices, thank Heaven, but I do hate a
Frenchman!" It frowns upon all appeals to the
former allegiance of naturalized citizens of this
country; and it thinks that it ought to be enough
for any man to be an American without the aid
of the hyphen which makes him a British-Ameri-
can, an Irish-American, or a German-American.

True Americanism, to conclude, feels that a
land which bred Washington and Franklin in the
last century, and Emerson and Lincoln in this
century, and which opens its schools wide to give
every boy the chance to model himself on these
great men, is a land deserving of Lowell's praise
as " a good country to live in, a good country to
live for, and a good country to die for."

(.896)

350

COLONIAL BOOK S

45 FOURTH /
New York City 3. GRamerv
W« Hunt Out-of- Print B

A 000 665 347 1